


Every Inch But One

by A Kiss of Fire (TigerDragon), Bright_Elen



Series: Prisons Without Bars [2]
Category: Catching Fire (2013), Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay (2014)
Genre: Abandonment, Attempted Murder, Baking, Bondage, Brainwashing, Delusions, Dom/sub, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Extremely Dubious Consent, F/F, F/M, False Memories, Family Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Jealousy, Mass Death, Mental Breakdown, Mind Control, Mind Rape, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Painting, Psychological Horror, Psychological Torture, Psychological Trauma, Psychotropic Drugs, Rape, Rape/Non-con Elements, Stockholm Syndrome, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, Tattoos, Tea Parties, Threesome - F/F/M, Torture, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-24
Updated: 2013-12-31
Packaged: 2018-01-05 21:30:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 21
Words: 36,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1098798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TigerDragon/pseuds/A%20Kiss%20of%20Fire, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bright_Elen/pseuds/Bright_Elen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Katniss Everdeen nearly tries to kill Haymitch when she discovers they left Peeta behind in the Capitol. She's more right than she knows. The Capitol has shadows darker and deeper than any of its gaudy lights, and Peeta Mellark is trapped in one of its darkest. </p><p>If he's lucky, brave and stronger than he knows he can be, he might get out with his soul. His sanity is pretty much out of the question.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So. Read the tags. They are there for a reason. In fact, go back and read them again right now. All of them. It is VERY IMPORTANT that you do so. For liability reasons, we must inform you that this fic may not be suitable for pregnant women or people with heart conditions. Or, you know, a moral compass of any kind. That sort of fic. We warned you. A lot.
> 
> That said, we really thought we were done with Minerva Snow after _Conquests_. We really, really did, up to and including fictional restraining orders. Then we went to see _Catching Fire_ , and she knocked on the door, and we said "No, thanks, don't want any." And then we started thinking about Peeta, trapped in the Capitol, with her.
> 
> And we were attacked by rabid plot bunnies. Fifteen thousand words later, we woke up in the middle of a story. If you see the bunnies, run. Trust us. They have teeth.
> 
> Inspiration and legal ownership of course belong to Susanne Collins, who we want to hug right around the neck for creating such a powerful and artistically credible dystopia. If only we didn't continue to be drawn into it.
> 
> Anyway, last words: we really did warn you. But if you can stand wading down through the dark and the horror, you might find something there that will give you more hope than you started with. We did.

**Now**

The room is white, small, and lit too brightly. It’s the first place they put me after the hospital bed, which I only remember in dream-like fragments. Sitting against the wall, I close my eyes and imagine the walls are a canvass. On the wall opposite the door, above the bench, I’d paint Katniss with her bow, surrounded by flames, ready to shoot anyone coming in. The walls to either side would be the forest outside District Twelve. The last wall would have portraits of everyone who helped us: Haymitch, Johanna, Finnick, Rue, Thresh, Beetee, Wiress, Mags, Cinna, Portia, even Effie.

And on the back of the door, Katniss again. This time with the expression I remember from after Finnick revived me, when her feelings were too strong to hide. When they were for me.

I pretend that it would be my secret, that they wouldn’t get to see that. But of course they would - the fish-eye camera in the corner would make sure of it. And of course they’d already seen her face after I died - the whole of Panem did.

But it’s not like I even have any paint anyway, so I can do whatever I want behind my eyelids.

The sound of the bolts moving inside the door makes me scramble to my feet. My eyes sting from the brightness, and when the reinforced steel swings silently inward, the corridor is complete darkness.

Two guards in black Peacekeepers uniforms enter, grab me by the arms, drag me fighting into the darkness. A needle stings in my neck and after a few seconds my brain goes warm and slow, and I can’t think of anything for longer than a heartbeat or two. Walking sends my sense of balance tumbling outside my body, and it’s only the guards holding me up by the elbows that keep me from crashing to the floor. As it is, they’re half dragging me, and I watch my feet stumble under me as we move.

Another door opens, this one much like the one to my cell, and the room inside is black. In the middle, light gleaming off its metal and vinyl, is a chair like the one in the stylists’ workspace. Except this one has thick leather straps on the arms and legs, and even one on the head rest.

Even drugged, I know what this means, and I feebly try to break away from the guards. They don’t even have to struggle as they force me into the chair. The leather straps are cool but not cold. Part of me that the drugs make indifferent wonders how long it’s been since the last person was touching them.

Another needle, and the world turns crystalline and incredibly clear. Like I can feel every hint of grain in the leather, every subtle stretch of muscle in my chest when I breathe, smell every chemical in the cool, antiseptic air.

I smell roses and spices: cardamom and anise, seasonings so expensive that only the Mayor and a few senior Peacekeepers could afford pastries made with them. I used to love them, but I have a feeling that won’t last.

“Leave us.” Capitol accent. Everyone here has a Capitol accent, but the woman’s voice behind me is different. Authoritative. Cold and sharp and hard.

“Lovely torture chamber you have here,” I say in a tone Effie would have approved of.

She laughs, and the sound corkscrews down my spine and coils up in my gut like one of the snakes in the Arena that were just waiting for a chance to bite me. “Do you like it?” she inquires, as though I’m a guest in her home instead of meat on a rack. “It seems a little drab to me, but I haven’t found the right artist to give it more life. Perhaps you could make a few suggestions.”

The light over the chair is still blinding, but judging from the direction of the sound, my interrogator is a tall woman, taller than Katniss.

“Some nice geometric wallpaper and a floral arrangement would perk it up,” I joke for lack of anything else to do. “Maybe some soft music.”

“Candlelight? Strings and soft horns? A hint of fresh citrus?” She sounds like she’s enjoying the idea. I don’t know if that should scare me more or less. I don’t know if there’s a limit to how scared I can be before it just stops mattering and becomes like breathing.

“No, I think one of those color-shifting lanterns from the Training Center dining room would be better,” I reply. “The citrus would complement your perfume nicely, though.”

“Thank you. Father always said I had a nose for scents. Perhaps I should have been an _unguentaria_. It would have been very peaceful, I suppose.” She moves away from me, humming to herself, and I can make out a shadow darker than the rest of the room. Movement. The glint of something small and metal.

I close my eyes again, try to shut everything out, but the drugs keep my senses in sharp focus. Panic grips my chest and my whole body tenses.

Cold metal touches my neck, wraps around it, tightens until I feel my airway start to collapse and then loosens again to a clinging fit. It’s just in time to let me groan as sharp, delicate slivers of agony drive into the back of my neck and then go numb with an absence of sensation that’s more frightening than the pain.

“What...was that?” My voice shakes. I’d be embarrassed if this were a different situation, but now I’m just terrified.

“Electrical filaments. They’ve finished attaching to the spinal cord up through the C1 vertebra.” She hums softly to herself, a strange little discordant tune that I think might be some kind of dancing song if it were written by a madwoman. “In a few more seconds, I’ll have your heart rate, blood pressure, adrenaline levels and a map of the information your body is sending to your brain. Eventually, I’ll have the information your brain is sending to your body, but that will take it longer to learn. It also monitors your blood chemistry, compares it to the profile I have in mind and corrects as necessary. It looks as though you absorb Clarity a little faster than most - I’ll have to compensate for that in the later phases.”

“Phases,” I say. “Great.”

“There’s no need to be so hostile about it. We’re going to be collaborators, you and I. No reason not to be polite, now is there?” The slyness in her voice tells me that she’s teasing me, that she’s not actually that out of touch with reality but she wants to see if I’ll bite on the idea that she is. Katniss probably would have. She’s not always good with the subtle cues.

“Of course. I apologize for my rudeness, Madam.” I turn my head towards her voice, and learn that the metal moves with me - my very own collar, complete with something that trails across my shoulder like a leash but doesn’t pull tight. A bundle of wires, maybe. The leather strap on my head’s loosened up to let me move, too. That should be a relief, but it isn’t - if she’s letting me move my head, she’s not worried about what I might do with it. Her description of the device sets in - if it works the way she says it will, she’ll be in complete control of what I feel or don’t feel below the neck. Maybe what I do. Maybe my mind, too, for all I know. I wonder briefly if they overheard my conversation with Katniss the night before the first Games, or if doing this is just part of the standard Capitol Torture package.

“I’m inclined to be forgiving,” she says, the subtle trill of her Rs just a little different than Caesar’s. “But only because you’re Peeta Mellark; if you won the heart of the Girl on Fire, there must be something special about you, and I’m eager to find out what.”

Knowing that makes me want to scream, run, cry, something. I let out a shaky breath and try for jaunty instead. “I do a mean layer-cake.”

“I look forward to trying one.”

For a weird, insane moment, I half-believe that I can bake my way out of this. I wonder if she gave me some other drug or did something with the wires, or if it’s just the fear grasping for any hopeful thought that floats by.

“I’d be happy to make one. You’ll have to let me up, of course.”

“We’ll get to that.” She hums again, and it sounds like anticipation. “Halo off.”

The lights burning into my face vanish, and suddenly the world is swimming with purple afterimages and live shadows. I can make out the shape of her in the midst of them, a silhouette darker than the rest of the room, and then the dazzle clears enough that I see her face.

“My name is Minerva Snow,” those delicate crimson lips murmur, “and I’ll be your technician for the duration of your stay, Peeta. Believe me, you should be honored.”

The terror rises up again, but now it’s background. Something hardens in my chest.

I bare my teeth. “Not yet.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Then**

The boy wasn’t meant to see her, but mistakes happened. Even for Minerva Snow, mistakes happened, and that was what she told herself a dozen times a day between the moment of the flat scream of the opening buzzer of the Quarter Quell and that night in the dark precious days before when she’d disabled the cameras and slipped into the rooms set aside for Katniss Everdeen. It had been a risk - calculated, but a risk - because there was every possibility that the President might believe that a lapse in surveillance on the most dangerous and precious of his enemies was unacceptable enough to punish one of his own daughters, but she had decided it was unavoidable. To have her _gladiatora_ so close, so infuriatingly close, and not so much as ask to speak to her would have been unbearable. Even her father’s anger would be more tolerable.

He had, after all, called the Quarter Quell and selected his new gamemaker especially to eliminate her.

Coriolanus Snow had never been a man to tolerate even the hint of defiance, of course. He had always prefered to eliminate threats early and completely, to cut them out root and branch rather than risk them growing into something harder to contain. But Katniss Everdeen had been a particularly thorny problem, because the people loved her.

“Draw and quarter her,” Juno had suggested when their father returned from his visit to District 12 with cold anger in his eyes. “Tighten security until the discontent passes. The people will forget her in a month.”

“And if they don’t, we’ll put them down in the street like dogs.” Diana, never patient at the best of times, rarely passed up an opportunity to advocate breaking an eggshell with a hammer. The staff meeting that morning had been no exception.

“All of them?” It had been difficult for Minerva to keep her own voice cool and dispassionate, because at that moment she had wanted to take her elder sisters and shake them bodily. Their view could be so very limited at times. “And who will make your gowns, Juno, or feed your Peacekeepers, Diana, when you’ve filled the streets of the Districts with corpses?”

They had answered her with nothing but hard stares, because they had no answer. Neither of them. Her father knew that as well as she did. “And what would you suggest, little adder,” he had asked her in turn, “since surveillance and the smothering of dissent are your responsibility?”

“Do nothing. Say nothing. Leave her in her little villa alone with her nightmares and excuse her from the Victory Tour on some pretext. Lingering effects of the nightshade, perhaps. Let her have the illusion of peace, and she will burrow into it until she smothers.” She could not tell them that she knew Katniss Everdeen, knew her fears and her dreams, and that given the chance she would hide so far from the cameras and the world that she would never trouble them again.

“Are you _mad_?” It was Juno who said it, but it might as well have been Diana. The thought was written on both their faces. “Allow a peasant from District 12 to disrupt the pattern of the Victory Tours? We’d look like fools!”

“Better to look foolish than to _be_ foolish,” Minerva had snapped back.

“The Victory Tour will proceed,” he had intoned in the voice that ended discussions, and Minerva had snapped her mouth shut in frustration. “The new gamemaker has practical suggestions for ensuring that Mellark and Everdeen are neutralized. We will try his way for a little while, and see what we observe. In the meanwhile, Diana, you will tighten security and be ready to make arrests of any Resistance cells your sister can find for you. Juno will remind the Districts that their full tribute will be expected this year, without exception.”

“Father,” Minerva had tried, but a hard glance had silenced her before she could even begin. She might fancy herself favored, but her father tolerated no defiance. Not even from her.

It had only gotten worse after that. Katniss had responded to pressure as she always did, by struggling to adapt and finally finding that backbone of defiance inside her that would not break, and the President had become ever more obsessed with destroying her. The quiet assassination order that Minerva had feared receiving in the months after Katniss’s victory was now out of the question. Whatever was to be done with Katniss Everdeen would have to be done in the full light of the cameras.

Then her father had informed her of his plans - Plutarch’s plans - for the Quarter Quell, and she had no longer been able to keep silent.

“This is a mistake, Father,” she’d pleaded softly - softly enough that it wouldn’t reach the ears of the guards that now accompanied him everywhere. “An accident would be better. Anything. Do not put her back in the arena.”

“There will be only one Victor of the Quell,” he had answered in a steady, measured tone under which swam something savage and hungry. “Panem will watch as she kills her allies, including Mellark. When one of the others puts her down, no one will weep.”

“What if she doesn’t?” she’d hissed. “You’ve seen the effect she has on people. What if she and her allies refuse to turn on each other? What if she can convince them to die together, spitting defiance, with nothing left to lose in denouncing us? Will the people weep, then, father? Or will they turn their eyes on us and make us their next bloodsport?”

“The girl wants to survive. She’ll do whatever is necessary to live.”

“No, Father.  She won’t.” Her eyes had burned with tears she didn’t dare allow to show. “She’ll do whatever’s necessary to save him, and she may be desperate enough to ignore the rules of the Games to do it.”

“Your infatuation with the girl is clouding your judgement,” he had snapped, the calm of his voice fraying, spilling his cards onto the table with the admission that he’d known who was with Katniss Everdeen that night in the hospital.

“And your pride is clouding yours!” She’d know the words were a mistake the moment they had left her mouth - too much, too fast, too far. They had stared at each other, father and daughter, wordless in the sudden understanding that each was contemplating whether the other might have become an unstable element in a regime without room for error.

If Minerva Snow had ever doubted that her father must, on some level, have loved her, that he did not tell his guards to put a pistol to her head and remove her from the world at that moment was all the proof she required. “Return to your duties and do not speak of her again,” he had said instead. Only that.

Because she loved him as well, she had obeyed and watched the storm gather unseen in the sky. Redoubled her efforts at investigating Heavensbee. Gritted her teeth and waited.

Hoped against hope that she was wrong.

Then, for the second time, Katniss Everdeen had returned to the Capitol and Minerva had known that she was doomed to her own act of pure folly every time the girl’s face had appeared on her screen - fierce-eyed, desperate, already committed to her own death.

So she blanked the surveillance, replaced the guards with her own people and made her arrangements. Enough Nox to keep the boy asleep, should he be slipping into Katniss’s room again. The right mixture of Flora, Mnemosyne and Reverie for her _gladiatora_.

Katniss had been reasonable. The fact that her precious fiance was only inches from them might have caused some unfortunate modesty, but it had also sharpened her awareness of the consequences of refusal. She had even been prepared to be obliging on the assurance that Minerva would do everything in her power to see that Peeta survived.

She was glad the girl would not remember the tears Minerva had shed after, while she’d whispered her despair at the _waste_ of sending Katniss into the arena when she could have remained at Minerva’s side and been safe. Tears were not a sign of strength or of virtue, and excepting that moment, she had not succumbed to them since she was a child.

That she had miscalculated Peeta Mellark’s dosage had only become apparent when she reviewed the sequestered footage of the room after her departure and heard his whisper into Katniss’s ear, the girl barely awake as his gentle shaking disturbed the grip of the drugs.

“Katniss? Who was that?”

The girl’s sleepy, drugged murmur had not been nearly natural enough - the Reverie had still been in her system, even if its primary work was already done. “There’s nobody here, Peeta. Just a dream. Go back to sleep.”

“Weird dream,” he’d murmured into Katniss’s hair, pulling her closer. He hadn’t sounded as convinced as Minerva would have preferred.

At least, she had consoled herself grimly, the arena would settle that for her soon enough.


	3. Chapter 3

**Now**

Her face is white as flour, her eyes framed in thick lines of kohl with a decorative scroll reaching down to her left cheekbone. Lips like the red-black drops of coloring we use to make pink icing at home. Almost subtle for the Capitol.

I realize that her face is familiar. Especially from this angle. I blink, remember, know for sure that she was in Katniss’s room the night before the Quell.

A computer somewhere in the darkness behind her tones softly, a musical half-chord.

“So you do remember me,” Minerva murmurs, reaching out with a hand whose nails glitter silver like scalpels to brush my cheek. “I wondered.”

While they are metallic, her nails don’t cut me. I turn away from her touch anyway. “What were you doing there, that night?” It’s stupid of me to ask. Whether she tells the truth or a lie or doesn’t answer, I’ll hear what she wants me to hear. I may as well just wonder in silence, but I can’t let it alone. Not about Katniss.

“I wanted to see her one more time.” There’s something in her voice that’s arresting, more frightening than that smooth cold detachment - emotion. Real, human, raw emotion. “I couldn’t send my _gladiatora_ to her death without one more night with her.”

No. I don’t want that to be what she said. I don’t want that to be the truth, but she’s a better actor than I am if she’s faking the longing in her voice. The affection. The desire.

I know I believe it when I’m thrashing against the leather straps, teeth bared, screaming in rage.

“I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you for touching her, you Capitol garbage! Whatever’s left of me will come for you!”

She laughs, low and wild and savage, and there’s something in that laugh that penetrates even the rage burning in my brain. Something like pain, like relief, like a full breath after days without real air. “Do you know that sound she makes in her throat when she’s about to tumble over the edge into release, Peeta?” she taunts me. “Do you know how she yields under a kiss when she wants it badly enough? Do you know the sound she makes when you hurt her and she likes it?”

If there are still words in my howls, they aren’t important, just another shape for my fury. She lets me scream as much as I want, pull uselessly against my restraints, and soon the rage burns out and leaves despair in its wake. A sob breaks through my throat.

No matter how hard I fought, I still hadn’t been able to protect her. This pale monster had violated Katniss right next to me, and I couldn’t do a damn thing about it. For all I know she’d done it before - and I start to run through our nights in the Capitol, which ones I slept heavily though, which ones could have had visits from the President’s daughter.

 _I’m sorry, Katniss_ , I think to myself. “Sorry I failed you.”

I don’t realize I’ve said the last part aloud until she reaches out and touches me again. “A woman’s heart is full of secrets,” she murmurs, and the kindness - false or not - in her voice burns in my ears. “Men can’t hope to know all of them. She even surprised me, in the end. I never imagined she would - could - leave you behind. Both of us behind, one way or another.”

I shy away from that - the fact that I’m here alone is a dark, cold abyss I don’t want to fall into. It takes a couple of swallows to find my voice. “She’s free. That’s all that matters.”

“Free?” She sighs and shakes her head, and her eyes go strange and distant. “She could have been free here - free to run in the woods and hunt to her heart’s content, free to be the glorious creature she is. Now she’ll be alone in the hands of people who’ll use her with no more thought than a soldier puts to a bullet, ‘free’ to be sacrificed like a bishop on the chessboard the Resistance is playing on with my father. You don’t imagine Plutarch Heavensbee arranged her escape from the dome just so she could be free, do you? Tell me the boy she loves isn’t quite so much of a fool as that.”

“I can tell you that the Capitol would never have let her go back to her old life.” There’s moisture under the collar now, and I shift uncomfortably. “And somehow I trust the Resistance more than you.”

Her eyes come back into focus, and she laughs very softly. “We’ll soon fix that,” she murmurs, and she touches my cheek again. “I think that’s enough conversation for now. We’ll speak more later. After you’ve had a chance to recover.”

She gives me a moment to wonder what she means, and then the pain starts - like each and every one of my nerve endings is exploding at the same time, and I can feel every single one of them even though Haymitch says you can only feel one pain at a time.

At least there isn’t room in me to see Katniss under this monster’s hands when my eyes clamp shut. Small mercy.

It’s the only mercy there is for a long, long time.

* * *

I become aware of brightness pushing on my eyelids, digging into my brain until sleep is impossible. I’m not sure I actually was asleep; my wrists, ankles and forehead ache, and my skin feels raw, almost burned, even though I can feel it whole beneath my fingers. I shift, and the pinch of the collar reminds me that it doesn’t really matter whether it was sleep or just unconsciousness. I consider slamming my head against the wall to escape again, but can’t quite bring myself to do it yet.

I squint my eyes open and start. The walls aren’t white any more.

The big portrait of Katniss with her bow and wreathed in fire is just where I’d imagined it, covering the wall from floor to ceiling, views of the Appalachian forest to either side. Our friends and allies on the wall opposite, and unarmed Katniss on the door. The last time I saw these walls, they were bare white metal. I reach forward, touch a brushstroke. It’s only mostly dry, and a bit of dark green comes off on my fingers. Which just means that if it is a hallucination, it’s at least high-quality.

The murals would be beautiful, except that they’re all wrong. Horribly, terribly, impossibly wrong. In the forest scenes I see thorned parasites overtaking the trees, the shadow of the muttations wearing our dead victims’ faces lurking in the undergrowth, a sky filled with coal dust. Katniss is aiming her bow not at the door, but lower. Crawling off the bench only makes it more eerie, because the arrow and her eyes - cold, murderous, merciless, the worst her eyes ever got in the Arena and worse still - seem to follow me. Everyone on the opposite wall looks at me with hatred and disgust, Haymitch drunk and pale, Johanna cheerfully psychotic, Effie lost in admiration of a little golden bangle, Cinna burning alive, and I have to turn my face away because I can’t bear to see the rest.

The portrait of Katniss on the door is waiting for me, looking at me with contemptuous amusement. Like she’s laughing at me for how pathetic I currently am. She’s not wearing the simple hunting clothes she likes or even the battered tribute uniform I last saw her in - she’s dressed in fitted leather, ornate and dangerous, like scrollwork on a bow that’s still cold metal. All black, silver and hints of red, and I almost retch when I realize it’s intended to remind me of Minerva.

The worst part is that it’s all in my own style, or close enough that I can’t tell. Did I paint this before the drugs wore off? Did Minerva pry the designs from my lips or my brain and then order a Capitol artist copy my style and paint it while she worked on me in the black room? I don’t know. I’m not sure which would be worse.

I press my hands over my closed eyes hard enough to see stars, and see the device on the leather choker painted onto Katniss’s throat instead. Minerva’s device - a watchful, predatory owl.

They haven’t bothered to give me clothes, so I scrub at the door with my hands, smearing the paint until the twisted version of Katniss is gone from the door and everything up to my elbows is covered in brownish muck. They must let me finish, because when I turn toward the picture of her on the back wall to start doing the same, the collar hisses softly like it’s letting out a breath and my body goes liquid and slack. I don’t so much fall as melt to the floor, and the Peacekeepers who come for me don’t even have to struggle - they just lift me, the paint on my hands smearing over their armor, and carry me back to the black room. It’s an upright frame they strap me to, this time, not a chair - cool black metal, tilted at an angle so my shoulders won’t take my whole weight and possibly dislocate. I’m coherent enough under the drugs this time to wonder if I should thank them for their professionalism or swear at them. I can’t muster the energy to do either.

Another hiss, once I’m bound and they’re gone, and the world goes sharp and crystal clear again.

“You wanted to try another draft of the door?” Minerva’s voice speaks to me out of the shadows lit only by holograms or computer monitors shielded so I can’t see them - a dull blue light that casts her alabaster skin in shadows so dark I can’t see her features. “I thought it was quite satisfactory, but I suppose there’s no helping artistic perfectionism.”

“Go to hell,” I whisper. “I’m sure they’d love you there.”

“Too much to do,” she laughs, as though I’m a friend who’s made a good joke and not the human being she just spent god knows how long torturing a few hours (days? I can’t tell any more) ago. “Revolutions to subvert, a damsel to rescue, governments to uphold, propos to produce. Casualties to calculate.”

I close my eyes to try to shut out her smirk. “Let’s just get this over with, then. Wouldn’t want to keep you.”

“Over?” Her voice turns to silk and shadows, and I have to physically flinch before I’m sure I’m imagining her hands on my chest. “What makes you think this ends, Peeta?”

I shiver. “Everything ends.” I don’t want think about how long it might be. I don’t want to think about what the end of this means - my death? The Resistance bombing the Capitol and everyone in it? Some twisted creature walking around wearing my face? I start wondering if I can hit my head on the cell floor hard enough to kill myself.

She laughs, and then there’s a warm cloth on my skin peeling the paint away slowly. “‘Everything’s eventual,’ one of my teachers used to say. He meant that given enough time, anything that can happen will happen. Somewhere. Sometime.” Her breath brushes my chest, cool and spiced like her perfume. “But don’t worry, we have plenty of time together. We’re not going to spent all of it with you screaming your lungs out. Not even most of it. What a waste that would be.”

A speaker hisses and clicks, going live. I hear someone screaming - a girl, younger, soprano, broken curses mixed in with it.

Johanna.

It could be fake, like the jabberjays in the arena, or it could be Johanna in her own black room. I don’t know.

Whole body tense, my jaw clamped shut, I ask a question between my teeth. “Why bother with all this anyway? We aren’t exactly the best-informed rebels on the continent.”

She chuckles, then murmurs “Hold,” and the screaming stops - breaks down into gasping silence, Johanna laboring for breath, trying to remember her own name. I know how that feels, now. “There are things that you know that I want to know,” she says softly, still cleaning my hands as though nothing else is happening. “Not my father, not the government. Me. There are other priorities - my father’s desire for retribution not least among them - but that is why we are in this room now, here, together. You have things that I want. I have things that you want. We can be of use to each other.”

She says that like we’re discussing the price of sugar or eggs, not the terms of my torture, and I laugh. It’s only a little hysterical.

“Shake on it?” I suggest, wiggling my bound fingers at her.

“If I let you down and you try to hurt me or run,” she murmurs, “the computer might not be able to stop you from hurting yourself while it administers your punishment.”

I snort. “Your concern warms my heart.”

“I’m sure it does. But not as much as Katniss’s kisses did.” Her hand brushes over my chest lightly, just over my heart, like she’s trying to snatch the memory of the feeling out and hold it between her fingers.

I decide that I’d rather twist on her machine for hours than give her that memory. I probably don’t have a choice - look at the inside of my cell - but I could hold out a little longer, maybe. Make her work for it more.

Johanna’s voice whispers over the speakers. “Fuck you, spam in a can. Is that all you’ve got?”

Minerva sighs.

It’s going to get much worse in a moment, but for now, I smile. “What she said.”

The pain starts again. At least this time, for the few burning breaths before the agony overflows and pushes everything else out, I’m screaming with Johanna instead of just listening.

When I wake up back in my room again, the door’s been repainted. If anything, the detailing is more elaborate and evocative this time.

I’m going to need a better technique than blind scraping if I’m going to destroy it every day. When the horror and the rage subside a little, I’ll be able to think about it.


	4. Chapter 4

**Then**

Like I did every evening, I was mixing the dry ingredients to save time for the next morning’s loaves. It was a good night; my mother had gone out to gossip and drink with her friends, leaving the rest of us in peace. Banneton was cleaning the shop after closing, Tunnock doing the accounting, and Dad mending our clothes along with the linens. I was thinking about the wedding cake we’d start tomorrow. There were so many colors, textures, and shapes of frosting I could use, so I usually started planning well in advance.

Just before the last light faded from the windows, there was a knock at the back door.

“Peeta? Get that, would you?” my dad called from the hearth. I put the bowls and measuring cups down, wiped flour on my apron.

I opened the door to Katniss waiting on our back stoop, pack heavy with squirrels and rabbits. Wisps of dark hair had come loose from her braid, moving slightly in the night air and brushing her cheek. A smudge of dirt in the same place suggested that that particular strand of hair had been bothering her earlier. I wanted to touch that place, push the hair back, feel her skin under my thumb.

“Hi,” she said guardedly. “Your dad at home?”

“Yeah,” I answered. “Come in.”

She followed me inside, hunting boots almost silent on the wooden floors, but I could still feel exactly where she was. Sometimes it felt like there was something in me like a compass needle that only Katniss could pull.

“Katniss!” My Dad was clearly happy to see her. Her expression softened a little in return. I thought she liked Dad, but maybe she only liked the bread he traded her. It was impossible to tell what she was thinking.

As soon as they started haggling, I turned back to my task, trying to concentrate, but it was hard with her standing in the same room. By the time she was done, I’d counted and recounted the same cup of flour three times.

She brushed by me on her way to the door. “Bye, Peeta.”

It was the first time she’d said my name. It was stupid how warm I suddenly felt.

“Bye, Katniss,” I managed to reply. She gave a casual wave as she trotted down our back steps, not even looking back.

In the kitchen, Dad whistled as he prepared the squirrel, but I didn’t hear it as I watched her walk away.

 

* * *

 

**Now**

I come tumbling out of the well of the memory gasping for breath like I’ve been drowning, like my body forgot to breathe while I was buried in the thought of Katniss’s eyes and her skin and the lips I spent longer than I want to admit dreaming about kissing. It’s almost dark in the black room, like the cool metal of the rack I’m strapped to and the delicate traceries of pain inside me are the only real things, but I know I’m not alone.

Minerva is there, even if I can’t see her. Sometimes I think I can feel her presence.

“Were you ever going to kiss her,” she says from somewhere behind me, “or were you just going to wait for her to trip over something and fall into your lap?”

I don’t remember telling her the memory. Could she have gotten it some other way? I don’t know.

Breathing starts to hurt less. I shake my head.

“She was always with Gale. Even when she wasn’t.”

As if summoned by the words, a holo of the two of them kissing flickers into blue-tinted life in front of me. The detail is exquisite. It’s hard to breathe around the knot it puts in my chest, but I don’t look away. It’s the only way I’ve seen Katniss since we split up in the arena. If I could move my arms, I’d reach out towards it, I miss her so much.

“I can’t tell whether you’re charmingly naive or just making excuses.” The light from the holo catches off her pale skin and the hard gleaming gray of her eyes as she glides around in front of me, careful not to obstruct my view. “You can’t tell me that no boy in District 12 ever lifted a girl out from under the hands of another.”

“If he hadn’t made her happy, I might have tried.” The holo is a video loop; the kiss only lasts a few seconds. I try to hold on to that. “After the mine accident, she only ever smiled around him or her sister.”

She laughs, like I’ve said something funny. Or maybe like she thinks I’m pathetic. I don’t really care which it is, just like I didn’t care if the mutt that bit me liked the taste.

“I wanted her to stay with me, you know. After the first games. Her mad little stunt with the berries to save you made it impossible, of course - it would have drawn far too much attention - but I almost offered it to her anyway.” I don’t know if she’s still talking to me, or if she’s talking to herself and I just happen to be here. The way her eyes move over the holo is strangely warm, lingering with desire and flicking away from the kiss as though she doesn’t like it and the way her mouth ticks up at the edges looks like real affection, like she’s a normal human being who cares about people. On her it seems wrong.

“She never would have agreed.” I can’t help needling Minerva. Trying to get some small revenge.

“You’d be surprised,” she murmurs absently, chuckling in her throat, and reaches out to run her hand along Katniss’s back. Where Katniss’s back would be. Her fingers pass right through the holo.

I look away, too late. Those hands on Katniss are their own nightmare.

“Not about this. You might have coerced her, but she’d never go willingly.” I remember the pre-Quell party, Katniss and I hating every moment of it. Hating the Capitol. I know I’m right.

“All falcons fight their traces at first. It’s natural.” She’s closer, now - close enough that when I feel her nails against my skin, I’m pretty sure it’s real. “Freedom is too lovely an illusion to part with easily.”

For what might be the hundredth or only the second time, I flinch away from her touch.

“I wouldn’t expect a rapist to understand.”

“I didn’t have to force her,” she breathes. “Any time. I want you to think about that, Peeta. About the moments she told me she was mine.”

I yank at the straps again, my voice a growl. “How many drugs did you give her? How many threats did you make? Do you even know what ‘willing’ means?” I start thinking about clawing at this woman, biting her, crushing her throat with my hands. I’ve killed and planned kills before, but this is the first time I relish it.

The pain comes crashing over me like a storm in the Arena, and I want to laugh at her for a mad, wild moment before I can’t do anything but scream because I know what it means when a bully goes from taunting you to punching you.

It means they don’t have an answer.


	5. Chapter 5

**Now**

I come to staring at the ceiling. I don’t even remember opening my eyes, just blinking away the brightness. I curl up onto my side, hands protecting myself from the light, and then sit bolt upright, shouting.

There are corpses under the bench. Brutus is staring at me with filmed-over eyes. He lies atop Wiress as if he was thrown there, but his body doesn’t hide her dried blood or the agony left on her face. Next to her are the morphling who sacrificed herself for me, the tribute I killed in the water, Foxface, Rue.

It’s a terrifying moment before I realize that they aren’t really in my room. It’s just another painting. At least this time I know it isn’t mine - the details are too real, too much like a holo. I scrub my bare foot over the floor, hoping it isn’t dry yet, but skid across a thick clear plastic instead. She doesn’t want me destroying this one. I set my jaw.

The painting on the door is back. This time her clothes are less detailed, but Katniss’s face looks even crueler than before. It hurts just to look at. As always, the surface is still tacky, and I scrub my forearm across it fiercely, then smear as much of the wet paint on the floor as I can. I start with Rue’s face, then Wiress’s. It runs out before I can cover even half the floor, but at least now my dead friends aren’t staring at me.

I sit back on the bench, head in my hands, breathing hard. When the door opens I don’t bother looking.

They don’t try to get me up. This time, they just give me another injection in my neck and leave. That scares me almost as much as the floor did, but nothing happens for a long moment. I breathe slowly, wonder if it’s slow-acting or a dud.

A swishing sound to my left makes me look. The sick forest is gone - the whole wall has retracted, leaving only a clear panel between my cell and the next one.

It’s dark in that cell, pitch empty black that seems to be painted onto the walls somehow so they eat the light spilling through from my room, but there’s Johanna tucked into a corner and I almost don’t care how terrible she looks, how livid the bruises on her face are or that I’m stark naked and paint-spattered and she’s wearing clothes. I’m at the panel, knocking on it, and feel myself smiling a little.

“Johanna!”

She’s blinking like she can’t see, like the light’s hurting her eyes, but when she hears my voice she smiles, too - tight, fierce, alive. Johanna. It takes her a minute to shove her way onto her feet - she has to put her hands against the wall to find her way upright - but then she’s coming toward me, still blinking, refusing to look away because she’s just that stubborn. “Hey, lover boy,” she rasps in a voice that sounds half-ruined but still hasn’t lost its life. “Don’t they have dimmers in District Twelve?”

I grin. “Not this part of it. Looks like Seven is even gloomier than on the holos.”

“It’s all the trees. Gets a little hard to see the sun, and they won’t give me my axe to chop ‘em down. Something about violent episodes.” Her hands find the glass, tracing it like she’s trying to define the frame of my body through a fog.

I lean my side against the window and splay my fingers across it. “I liked ‘spam in a can.’ Very evocative.”

“It was a good moment.” Her eyes are watering, squinting, but she’s finally focusing on me. “You look pretty good for a guy who spends twenty hours a day screaming.”

I show her the back of my neck. “Fancy pain-wires in my brain. No outer damage. Does other stuff, too.” Stuff I don’t want to think about.

“My guy’s old-fashioned. Likes his fists and whips and pointy objects.” Johanna raps her hand against the glass like she’s testing it for weaknesses. “Gotta respect the classics, I guess.”

“Not really.” My voice goes murderously flat at the image of what that must be like. I’m finding it easier and easier to contemplate killing people since I got here.

She smiles. It’s a horrible expression, but it’s real. “Nah, but if I say it enough times, maybe he’ll let me close enough to rip his throat out.”

I’d say I’m not the only one, but honestly, Johanna never seemed to have much trouble with it.

“Good to see you’re about as murder-happy as always,” I say, genuine affection in my voice. “My violent fantasies are new.”

“So’s your decor. They decided you needed to live in a gallery?” She’s trying to make light of it, which is nice of her, but I can see the way her eyes change when they move over the walls and floor. Over the smear on the door. Nice to know I’m not the only one who hates it.

I tap the collar again. “She’s an artist, too.” I’m a little surprised the glass doesn’t blister at the sound of my voice.

“Oh, yeah. Real tasteful.” There’s a faint hiss I can just barely hear, and Johanna jerks herself up against the glass. Gas. There’s gas in her room. The last time either of us were together and there was gas, it tried to eat the flesh off our bones.

Her voice shakes, but she still sounds pissed. “If you ever get out of here,” she says, “tell President Snow to fuck himself for me. And tell Katniss I’m sorry I didn’t get to see her naked, too.”

Heart pounding, I try and fail to sound calm. “Him, my artist, and Spam-man,” I promise, hoping it’s not the last thing I ever say to her. “But you’re still not seeing her naked.”

“Damn... shame.” She slumps down the glass a little, staggers a few steps, hits the wall and slides halfway down it. Her eyes are huge and dilated, and she giggles like someone’s tickling her ribs. If I could have ever imagined someone tickling Johanna’s ribs without losing a hand. “I feel weird,” she declares, then giggles again. “Not dead. Not dead is good.”

Dread creeps over me. _She’s an artist, too,_ my own voice says back to me. My heart only pounds a few times in terror before the glass slides away into the wall and the gas from Johanna’s cell floods into my own.

I scramble backwards, pointlessly. The gas is in my lungs before I’m halfway across the cell. I half-expect to get giggly and sleepy like Johanna, but I don’t. I don’t feel anything. I start to wonder if it just doesn’t work on me, and the panic and adrenaline start to filter out of me, and I remember Johanna. The cell door’s open. I should try to help her.

I start toward the door, see her looking up at me in dazed confusion, and then the adrenaline is back but without the panic. It’s hot and throat-tightening and it flickers behind my eyes like a bonfire catching, and it makes my body respond in ways that make me incredibly aware of how naked I am.

Johanna stares at me, blinking, and giggles again. “This,” she enunciates in the over-clear way people do when they’re drunk, “is so not the time for that, lover boy.”

The impulse to push her down, shut her up with a kiss, and just take her on the floor crashes through me. I gasp, double over, turn away. I hold the edge of my bench, stare at the faded cushion, try to breathe slowly. The pounding in my head and the throbbing between my legs only get worse, and when she giggles again - I’m infinitely aware of her eyes on my ass - I get a crystal-clear image of grabbing her by the hair and shutting her up an entirely different way.

“The gas,” I pant out. “It’s doing this. Don’t.” I can’t figure out what I’m trying to tell her. “Don’t look.” I wonder if I should try to take care of this myself, or if I can just ride it out like the pain.

“You don’t look okay.” Her voice changes a little, and it’s still Johanna. Drugged, sluggish, minutes behind in the conversation but still Johanna. “Think Katniss thoughts.”

I do. All the times I wanted to touch Katniss, all the times we did. The few nights we shared together, how I woke up in the middle of more than one almost as hard as I am now. I put a hand on myself, trying to forget Johanna, trying to get this red-hot thing out of me. The jolt of pleasure is so raw that it almost hurts.

I do forget Johanna, for a while. Even with Katniss’s eyes looking down on me like she wants to put that arrow through me. I’m humiliated and on fire enough that I almost wish she would.

When I slam up against the edge of release and go grinding along it, unable to get over, unable to stop the jerking spasms of my body trying to force past whatever’s holding me back and _get_ there, I beg her to.

“Please,” I whisper raggedly. “End this. Please. Make it stop, make it stop.”

Johanna makes a barely coherent sound, and the raw red thing in my head growls in interest.

I slam both hands on the bench, refusing to look, eyes screwed shut, trying not to move or think or be.

She makes the noise again, and it goes all the way through me.

 _It’s not like it’s your fault,_ reasons a part of my mind that I instantly hate. _Or like she’ll notice. She probably won’t even remember. It won’t take long._

I dig my nails into my thighs. _Katniss doesn’t remember Minerva, either._

_Exactly. And it doesn’t bother her at all, does it?_

I choke on a sob. Before I know what I’m doing, I’ve crawled over to Johanna. The jumpsuit she’s wearing comes apart in my hands like it’s made of tissue.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper. When my hands reach her skin, I moan with how good it feels and shudder like someone’s driven a knife into my chest. I wish someone had. I wish someone would.

Johanna stirs, eyelids half-open and her eyes barely seeing, and smiles. It’s a doll’s smile, lovely and vacant and without anything behind it. I hate how much easier that makes it.

Pushing into her is heaven, taking the painful, crazy edge of the drug and making everything feel wonderful. I hate it. Her body feels so good wrapped around me, and I can’t stop pushing into her, and I hate it and I hate myself and I don’t know how I’m going to be able to ever look at her again.

“Peeta,” she mumbles, like I’ve shaken her half-awake out of a dream. Confused, disbelieving, sleepy. “Where’s Katniss?”

Does she think she’s dreaming? I hope she does, and then want to strangle myself for hoping because I don’t know if I want her to think so for her sake or so I can pretend this never happened. I lean over Johanna and whisper in her ear, praying that it’s the first. “Shh. She’s watching.”

The part of me that isn’t giddy with ecstatic pleasure or wishing I could rip my own lungs out wonders distantly if this is why the painting over my bed was painted that way in the first place. How many moves ahead Minerva planned this.

I don’t want to know. I don’t want to think about it. With Johanna winding herself around me, I don’t have to.

That insidious voice was right. The first time doesn’t take long. The second takes longer.

When I can finally stop, I lay Johanna on her bench, clean her as best I can with the disintegrating remains of the jumpsuit, and flush the whole thing down the toilet. When I go back to my cell both wall panels swish closed.

The guards are waiting. Part of me hopes Minerva will turn the machine on and never turn it off again.

The rest of me knows she won’t.


	6. Chapter 6

The kitchen is big, gleaming, and filled with technologically advanced equipment. I’m not sure I’ll even be able to use any of it, but the head cook assures me that everything has a training holo I can watch until I get it right. I hope I don’t have to watch them too many times. I want to make a good impression.

It turns out that the mixers and ovens aren’t too complicated after all. One viewing of each appliance’s video has made me confident enough to begin an orange and anise sweet bread. It should be a good addition to the afternoon tea they take at this household.

Once I’ve set the dough to rise, I have a little time to explore the pantry, walk-in coolers, and spice closet. Their size would be impressive anywhere in District Twelve, but this is for a relatively small manor. Of course, I should have expected to be impressed - there isn’t another house or fence for miles, and we’re only technically inside the boundaries of the nearest District. Seven, I think. Everyone says that nobody’s allowed to live outside the District compounds unless you have pull in the highest places. So even if there’s only a dozen household staff and the lady and sometimes her guests, this place could serve all the townsfolk in Twelve and at least half the miners besides.

I wonder what job Katniss has been called for. I’d think they wouldn’t need a hunter, with their weekly hovercraft delivery of supplies, but maybe the lady likes game meat more than farm-raised. I haven’t seen Katniss since they invited us onto the train; we each got our own car, and the doors between them didn’t open.

The elegant timer plays a melody, and I check the dough. It looks exactly like it should, and has the right texture, not too tough but not too weak. I hum to myself as I form it into small rolls with flower-shaped decorations.

“Should I bring in a dead squirrel or two to make it more homey? Or slap you and call you pathetic?” Katniss’s voice is harsh, but at least it’s a little bit amused. That’s better than it could be, even if the jibe hurts. I don’t turn around yet. For one thing, I’ll lose my place on the rolls if I do.

“She never called me pathetic,” I correct, still focused. “Spacey, cowardly, and girlish, but not pathetic. Just not her style.” Another roll makes it to the baking sheet.

“Too high-class for a baker’s wife, I guess,” she needles, which would be almost funny given who her father was if Katniss didn’t have a knack for making anything she says sound dangerous when she wants to. She wants to now, apparently. “I’m hungry, and she says I can eat. What is there?”

I nod towards the smaller refrigerator, hands still busy. “There’s salad, juice, cheese, and cold meat in there, and bread in the pantry. Fruit. Chocolates. Pretty much anything you want.”

“That’s what she said, too. ‘Anything you want.’” She laughs softly, and I hear her brush by the table on her way to the pantry. “I think I could get used to that.”

Even with the heat of the oven at my back, I shiver.

I catch her coming back out of the pantry out of the corner of my eye, more movement than anything, and I finally decide I can’t stand not to look at her any longer. The rolls are done, anyway, so I turn around and push the sheet into the oven and then reach for a towel to wipe my hands and cover my glance.

It doesn’t really work, because I wind up staring. Katniss catches me, smirks, and pushes herself up onto the counter with her bag of sweets in one hand and her pair of oranges in the other.

At first her outfit seems relatively normal: close-cut pants, a figure-skimming vest, sleek boots, all black with touches of deep red around the edges. But it all fits together like it’s one piece, like it was molded from her body, and it seems strong, too, like if I tried to cut it with one of the razor-sharp knives hanging on the magnetic strip, I’d have to really work at it to get anywhere. There’s a subtle silver pattern embossed on it, scrollwork that suggests shapes without defining them.

That pattern is repeated on the molded leather arm guards that protect her from her wrists to elbows, and on the tooled leather belt, and on the sheaths that it supports, and on the hilts of the knives in them.

“There’s a back-and-breast cuirass - that’s what she calls it, anyway - that goes with it. She’s showed me pictures, but it’s still being fitted.” Katniss sounds smug, almost preening, and she runs her fingers through the fine braids that have woven beads and ribbons in her hair before she starts peeling the orange. “She was angry about that. Someone is going to get a beating.”

I try not to frown at that. “Are you going to need all that just to hunt?”

“Depends what she wants me to hunt.” Her lips are a different color - I didn’t notice until she bit into the orange, but there’s some kind of delicate stain on them that makes them a sharper red. There’s something around her eyes, too - a little darkness that makes them stand out more. It gives them a predatory look I don’t like at all. “Or who.”

I swallow, wishing that I could have refused to come. “Any requests in the baked goods department? I can make just about anything here.”

“I’m going hunting after tea. We’ll see what you can do with what I bring back.” It’s almost a challenge, the way she says it. Like we’re playing a game. Like we’re in this together somehow, making our way in this new place.

If someone had asked me a few days ago what I wanted most in the world, I’d have said it was to hear Katniss Everdeen talk to me that way. Now, right now, looking at the huntress in front of me wearing our new lady’s colors, the only thing I’m sure I want is to be back in District Twelve where the worst thing I have to worry about is my mother.

 

* * *

 

**Now**

“Wake up, Peeta.”

The voice dredges me out of unconsciousness. I’m curled on the bench again, and for once not staring at the portrait on the back of the door. Instead, a familiar figure blocks my view.

“Portia?” I croak, probably from all the screaming. She looks just the same, pristine and pressed and perfect, and the contrast between her and the bodies painted onto the floor at her feet makes me wonder if I’m having a nightmare.

Then I look into her eyes, and I know I am. Portia would never look so happy to see me in the state I’m in. Never.

“It’s time to get up,” she tells me, almost gently but without a hint of give. The way she did before the Games. The way she talked to me before the Quell, when she caught me sneaking back into my room just before dawn. “You have an interview to do, and we need to get a move on. Lots to do.”

I get up and follow. I don’t bother to ask her what the interview is about or why I’m having one, because it doesn’t matter. The grooming marathon was always hateful, but doubly so now that Portia is all wrong, no gentleness or compassion in her eyes at all. Like their doctors removed them from her surgically. I try not to make eye contact while she cleans, waxes, trims, polishes, and paints me.

The guy in the mirror looks pretty much like he always did after a session with Portia, and it makes me want to break the glass with my bare hands. I shouldn’t look the same. Not after what I did. The high-necked jacket even hides the metal of the collar, like nothing has changed. It’s a lie and I hate it.

“My lady,” Portia gasps, and I see her drop a curtsy in the mirror. Then I catch Minerva’s reflection just at the edge of the glass, and I want to be sick. She’s going to tell me what to say, and I’m going to say it, because I don’t think I can bear to be a monster again.

“Please continue, Portia,” my tormentor tells her, as though they’re on the warmest terms the closest thing the Capitol has to a princess and a stylist can be. “I just need to review Peeta’s script for the interview with him. Make sure all the details are correct.”

Portia nods as though that makes all the sense in the world and goes to work on my hands, filing and polishing my nails. She’s doing a great job considering how ragged they’ve become from my daily paint-scraping.

“Do tell,” I say wearily to Minerva’s reflection.

She taps something on a small black cylinder she’s carrying, and gleaming blue letters start to crawl up the mirror in front of me. The writing is good - frighteningly good, actually, because it sounds like me when I’m thinking on my feet. It has everything, right down to the pauses and the verbal tics. It reads like I’m actually talking about the last day in the Quell from memory.

My old cards from Effie were never this eerie. Of course, Minerva has had plenty of time to learn how I talk under a variety of circumstances.

“It’s even mostly true,” I murmur. The only problem is the end.

I can only hope that Katniss disregards my pleas for the cease-fire like she always refuses to back down.

I nod to Minerva. “Will this be on a prompter or do I need to memorize it?”

“There will be a prompter, but you should know it by heart already.” Her lips curve in a smile that makes my insides twist. I close my eyes and try reciting the first few sentences in my head. Then the last few. Then a paragraph in the middle.

I’m perfect.

My stomach sinks. “Yeah. I do.” I get up, not caring if Portia is done with my nails or not.

“And Peeta?” Minerva reaches out, her fingers passing a few millimeters from my face so as not to disturb my make-up. “Just in case the thought that you’re speaking to an audience that might include your lady love tempts you to, shall we say, improvise... you should be aware that I have several very safe paralytics available in aerosol form. Several of which leave the subject extremely aware and conscious of what’s happening to them while they’re helpless to move. Just something to think about. Now, smiles on and chin up.”

It’s a good thing I don’t have anything in my stomach.  I’d hate to mess up Portia’s hard work.

 


	7. Chapter 7

It’s dark, and the bed is swaying gently with the motion of the train. I’m half-awake, persistent thoughts and fears keeping me from true sleep.

The door slides open. “Peeta?” Katniss whispers.

She comes all the way in my compartment as I sit up, closing the door behind her. I shift aside to make room for her, and she crawls into bed with me, lying with her back to me. I curl my body around her and wrap my arm around her waist. Her warmth lets me relax for the first time in days.

“Couldn’t sleep either?” It had been quiet before she came in, so not a nightmare.

She shakes her head. “You don’t mind?”

I pull her closer. “Never.”

Then she lets herself relax, almost melting in my arms, and I fight sleep just so I can feel her against me for a little while longer. Her breathing sounds like peace.

I don’t know how long I sleep, but I jolt awake to cold and darkness and a hard, narrow bench under me instead of a soft luxurious bed. Alone. The reality of this place crashes down on me, and it’s like I’ve lost her all over again.

There’s a soft tone, and the door illuminates its edges in faint white light - too faint to see anything by, except the location of the door itself. Then it cracks open, and the corridor outside is dark, too.

Not entirely, though. A wave of tiny lights shoots down the hall in a single line, obviously pointing towards something. I think about walking in the opposite direction, but I’d probably get about five steps before they stopped me.

The lights take me through the dark corridors to another illuminated door, with a smaller square illuminated in the wall beside it. There’s a symbol on the smaller square, stylized but recognizable - clothing on a hanger. It pops open toward me when I push it, and there’s a soft black robe, sweatpants and a pair of slippers inside.

Minerva liked my performance. My moral outrage and pride want to refuse the clothes. The rest of me doesn’t care where small comforts come from. I put them on.

The cabinet’s lights go out, and the illuminated door hisses open softly - slowly, because it’s heavy, metal and nearly eight inches thick. Inside is the black room, the shrouded computer terminals flickering in indecipherable patterns of blue light, the center of the room occupied not by a chair or a rack but by an elegant round table of black stone and two dark wood chairs with black and silver upholstery. There’s tea on the table, rolls and other pastries and eggs and breakfast meats, and Minerva is seated in one of the chairs but rises and drops a black silk napkin onto the table casually as she stands. She’s wearing the same outfit she was outside the prep room, black silk dress with delicate red and violet and blue highlights woven in almost imperceptibly, embroidered with silver so dark it almost fades into the black. Subtle jewelry, obsidian stones, except for the delicate platinum bracelets that wind intersecting geometric patterns up and down her forearms. For the first time, I realize that she must deliberately dress differently for work - I would have seen all that metal and bare skin, even in the normal dark of black room, so she must wear some kind of bodysuit with a coat to get that flowing shadow effect that only exposes her hands and her face and her throat. For some reason I don’t think about trying to hurt her. Maybe it’s the dream-like quality of the whole thing. Waking up in the middle of the night to have tea with your torturer is the sort of thing you don’t really believe is happening.

I’ve never really been in a position to think clearly about this place before, so I take the opportunity to really look at the room while I walk toward her. Really take my time.

I can’t tell how big it is. The walls are the same light-eating black as Johanna’s cell, and the pearlescent light illuminating us and the table forms a pool that doesn’t reach nearly far enough to see any sort of wall or ceiling. The floor where the light touches looks like delicate silver and gray tile, but I can feel that it isn’t when my foot comes down on it. Some kind of projection, then.

The floral arrangement is real, though. So is the color-shifting lantern suspended over the table from some invisible thread, and the hint of citrus in the air.

The music isn’t something I recognize, and it’s almost too soft to hear, but it’s there, too. It’s weirdly energetic, though it has an edge to it that makes it fit into the atmosphere more than it doesn’t.

“Glad you took my advice about the lamp.” I stop at the edge of the light, just behind the unoccupied chair. “Candles would be too warm-toned.”

She crosses around the table and brushes my hand with her nails, then draws the chair back and offers it to me. “You were right. It’s much more comfortable this way.”

I take a roll - sweet, bits of orange zest, aniseed - and blink at it, knowing it means something but unsure what. It smells wonderful. “Did I make these?”

“Don’t be absurd. You’ve slept for the better part of two days, and these are fresh.” She smiles as she walks back around the table and seats herself, taking one of them for her own plate and pouring herself tea. “Please, help yourself.”

I do. “Sorry,” I reply dryly after the first delicious bite, “but my grasp on plausibility is a bit weak right now. Can’t imagine how that happened.”

“‘Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’ So you see, you’re in good company.” She sips her tea and smiles at me, in that way that people do when they think they’ve been clever. I make a noncommittal noise and start on another roll.

“I suppose that would have been more witty if I’d thought to bring a hat. Ah, well. Missed opportunities.” She sighs gently, shaking her head and taking a bite from her roll. She seems to enjoy it as much as I do. “You did very well on the air. Sympathetic, devoted, confused at the wrong course your beloved is taking. We’ll give it a little time to settle in before we follow up. Propos are very much like baking, really - it’s as much about time and environment as it is about ingredients and heat.”

A follow-up. I shouldn’t be surprised, but it takes a bit of the enjoyment out of the food. I keep eating anyway.

“You know she’s never listened to me about not fighting, right?”

“That’s my father’s delusion, not mine.” She clicks her tongue in disapproval. “He seems to think that if she sees you in our vile clutches, she’ll flinch at the thought of obviously helping Coin and her merry band of revolutionaries. She won’t, of course. No, the good people of the Districts and the Capitol were our audience, and you were extremely effective. The percentage of people who believe The Girl on Fire is being used by dissident elements who are a danger to us all is up by fifteen points already.”

I stare. “You have a poll for that?”

“I have polls for everything. Most of them, people don’t even know that they’re taking.” She smiles again, seemingly unperturbed by my disbelief. If anything, I’d have to say she’s enjoying explaining herself.

It’s not a surprise, and I suspect that I’ve had to sit - or stand - through similar explanations before, even if I don’t remember them.

I try the tea. It’s milky and slightly sweet, but strong enough not to be overpowered. It complements the bread nicely. I could get used to this part.

“So the President missed the fact that Katniss broke the arena to defy him? That seems like a pretty big oversight.”

“His interpretation is that she did it to survive. More specifically, to allow you to survive. You see, he’s come to believe that she’s very much in love with you. Enough to die for you, apparently.” Her smile stays polite and warm, but something venomous and sharp moves behind her eyes.

She’s jealous. Dozens of hints I never noticed or understood before slot into place, and I know it like I know that there’s a little too much anise in the rolls. Maybe I was just too scared or hurt or sleep-deprived to see it before. She’s jealous of me, Peeta Mellark, baker’s son from the district last in everything.

I bite down a laugh. The table has a sheer cloth over it to cushion the dishes without obscuring the marbling. I focus on that to try to calm myself.

Laughing at the President’s daughter who is also my torturer is not a good way to keep enjoying my breakfast.

“I, on the other hand, think that Katniss is a very practical young woman. And I think that her affections can be rather ... malleable, shall we say? I hear she’s much in Gale’s company, of late, so perhaps my father’s belief in her indispensable love for you is a bit misplaced.”

It hurts, because it’s always been Gale and because I know what Minerva means by ‘malleable,’ but the pain drives the laughter away and I feel safe again. Then that thought takes the air out of my lungs. Pain is safe? I often wonder if I’ll ever see daylight again, but this is the first time I wonder if leaving this place would even help.

Her voice softens, and I hate that part of me is grateful for the sympathy she’s at least faking convincingly. “It must be very difficult, being the one she chooses only when other people are looking. I can’t imagine how that must feel.”

I shrug. “I’ve had worse.”

“I know.” The way she says it snaps my head up, and those watchful gray eyes are waiting. “I suppose you ought to know that you won’t have to worry about her any more, either.”

The way she inflects _her_ is different. Not the way she refers to Katniss, no hint of possessiveness or admiration. This is gentle but uninvolved, like when the Mayor brings the personal effects of a dead miner to his widow.

“Johanna?” I hazard. Did they kill her? Move her somewhere else? Even after... _that_...knowing she was close was comforting.

“Of course not. I would never allow one of my guests to suffer such a mischance.” She sounds gently, professionally offended that I’d even think that. It’s so alien that I just stare blankly again and wrack my brain to try to understand what she’s trying to tell me.

I run through the other women I’ve known who were still alive at the end of the Quell. Portia, Effie, Prim, Mrs. Everdeen, my mother...no one else, really.

 _I’ve had worse,_ I said.

“My mother.”

“Unfortunately, yes.” She sips her tea and looks for all the word like she’s genuinely regretful she has to tell me news like this.

“How?” I’m guarded, more worried by the way it could have happened and who else might have been involved than by her loss. Assuming it’s true.

“Quickly, I understand. Fuel-air incendiaries are too violent to allow for lingering suffering.”

The roll drops from my hand to the floor. I feel like she’s punched me in the stomach. “So...the bakery...my father...”

“The District.” She sighs again and shakes her head. “A terrible waste, really.”

I want to ask about Katniss’s family, but I don’t. Other survivors. If there’s anything left at all.

I guess I always knew I was never going home. I never thought I wouldn’t have a home to go back to.

She seems to pick the thought out of my head. “I understand the Victor’s Village is still intact, for what use that may be.”

A huff of air escapes me. “Of course.”

“It is rather ironic, I suppose.” She sighs again and sets down her tea, then picks up a slice of toast and begins to add eggs and bacon. “For what it might be worth to you, I argued against the decision at length. I was overruled.”

I blink at her, too far in shock for tears. Incredulity wins out instead. “Does that mean you’re the sanest person calling the shots? Because that’s terrifying.”

“I suppose it is, yes. I’m really quite reasonable. Be glad you don’t know my elder sisters.” The edge of her mouth quirks up in a faint smile. “They certainly wouldn’t mind the chance to meet you. Briefly, for a given definition of the word.”

I consider asking her to do it. Maybe one of the others would kill me and I’d be free of this place. Free of my thoughts and memories.

“Don’t worry,” she reassures me. “There isn’t any universe in which I part with you. More tea?”

Wordlessly, I hold out my cup.

Bashing my brains out is looking more attractive by the minute.


	8. Chapter 8

She takes me aside on the beach. I don’t want to leave the others so soon - especially not with the Careers still in the jungle somewhere - but I can’t tell her no. When Beetee says he needs two guards, I volunteer first, then Katniss.

Johanna and Finnick leave with the wire, and Katniss and I settle into a guard pattern on either side of the tree. Occasionally I’ll take a break from scanning the forest to watch Beetee’s progress. I don’t know anything about electronics, but he puts the wires in place with the critical eye and precise motions of a skilled craftsman, and that I do understand. For a moment I let myself hope that he and I both survive the escape plan. I’d like to get to know him better. I try to stop there because there are so many people I want - and wanted, before they died - to know better.

Focus on the mission. We’re close. We just have to survive until midnight.

“All done?” I hear Katniss ask Beetee. They’re on the other side of the tree from me. I keep watching for the Careers.

“Done,” Beetee answers her, and then grunts, coughs wetly, and hits the ground. A cannon shot breaks the air.

I dash around the tree, looking everywhere, trying to see where the danger is and hoping it didn’t get Katniss. Relief floods me as I see her standing there unhurt. I take position next to her, facing outwards, on high alert.

“What happened?” I whisper. “Enobaria? Brutus? Did you see them, Katniss?”  

“Not yet.” She bends down and wipes a knife on the thin grass, leaving a red smear where it touches. “Wire’s in place. We need to move.”

I freeze, unable to believe my eyes. Looking back, I see Beetee’s body, blood running slowly downhill. “Katniss? Did you...”

“Shut up, Peeta,” she says, irritated and just a little bit tired, her bow already out and Beetee’s food and water slung over her shoulder along with ours. “I’m moving. Are you coming?”

Suiting action to word, she starts for the boundary with sector eleven. The bugs are quieting down. We don’t have much time. When the clock strikes, this whole area is good to light up with white electrical fire.

Beetee’s dead.

Katniss killed him.

Shaking myself out of paralysis, I crash after her, trying to catch up.

He had to have attacked her. She only ever killed when she had to. Hasn’t she?

But Beetee was in on the plan. Attacking her would render the whole thing pointless. Haymitch never told me the details, but knowing there was an escape plan at all made it pretty easy to figure out. Predictable hazards you could set your watch to. A large jolt of electricity and the means to direct it, most likely to the force fields. Knowing that, who else would care enough or have the resources to pull it off but the revolutionaries? And that meant that Katniss was the priority. She sparked the revolution even when she wasn’t trying. I imagine they’re drooling over what she could do if she was.

Beetee could have been a double agent for the Capitol. That would explain his attacking her. Except that all Beetee had to do to make sure the escape failed was not do the wiring, or do it wrong. Except I didn’t hear him attack her.

Except that Katniss didn’t look surprised or upset that he was dead.

Suddenly I realize how much I don’t know. I have no reason to trust the footage of the first Games. I only have her word about how Rue died. I watched her drop a cloud of tracker jackers on me and the Careers and then just accepted she did it because she was trapped and didn’t have any other choice. Because she told me she didn’t have any other choice.

She moves through the undergrowth ahead of me, silent and swift as a ghost, and I wonder if she couldn’t have slipped away out of that tree just this easily.

If she wanted to.

It’s hard to breathe, and not just because of the heavy jungle air or trying to run a day after my heart stopped. Believing in Katniss’s goodness has been at the core of me for most of my life. Having that shaken reminds me of the first time I realized that not everyone’s mother yelled at them for moving her things. That my mother kissed my brothers sometimes, on the cheek, but never me.

Of finding out she expected Katniss to kill me, or let me be killed. That she was thinking about the prosperity a District Twelve Victor would bring, not having to watch me die on screen in front of her.

I’m a few steps behind Katniss now. I call her name and she wheels on me and hisses “Quiet!” Her eyes burn into me until I’m back within reach of her, and then she grabs hold of me and pulls me in until her lips are against my ear and whispers in a voice that burns like the clouds in sector two, “If you don’t keep your mouth shut, they’ll hear us. Don’t make me stash you somewhere and come back for you.”

“Why did you kill Beetee?” I whisper back.

“We were done with him,” she answers flatly. “We need to move, Peeta. Johanna and Finnick might be coming back up after....”

Lightning crashes down into the tree, the flash illuminating her face even through the trees, and then ripples and slashes out behind us. She doesn’t move - trying to outrun it would be pointless - she just watches it come. It stops in the air, like the fog did, and surges up toward the sky in a rippling spiderweb. A few seconds, and then another spiderweb.

Two cannons echo over the hiss and crackle of the lightning. Katniss sighs. “Damn. They _will_ be coming back up. We need to have cover.”

“Why?” It’s a stupid question, but I can’t not ask it. I need the world to make sense again. Need her to be the person I thought she was.

“So I can shoot them. Questions later. Move.”

My mouth snaps shut, and she turns away into the jungle again. I stumble after.

What’s most shocking is that she only seems annoyed by my slowness to catch on. Not as though she suddenly became awful, but as though she was awful all along and I’ve just been blind until now.

We hike for about five or ten more minutes. She finds a tree she likes, has me hide in the undergrowth near it, and climbs until she’s hidden in the lower branches. We wait.

Finnick comes first, most obviously, calling for Beetee. Occasionally for Katniss. He walks like a man who’s only frightened of the jungle around him, not living and thinking predators with bows and arrows. I want to call back to him. I want to do something.

I can’t make a sound.

Finnick stops in a dozen feet from me, turning around to get oriented, not wanting to head for the lightning storm that’s only starting to die out. Between one breath and another, his throat’s sprouted the metal shaft of an arrow and is gushing blood. He takes a step, two, eyes wide with disbelief. His mouth forms ‘Katniss?’ soundlessly.

When he tumbles to the undergrowth, he barely makes a sound. Not like Johanna, who I get just a glimpse of as she goes crashing back down the hill at a dead run. Two arrows whistle through the air, but I don’t hear her cry out or fall.

Katniss comes scrambling down the tree, bow in one hand, swearing under her breath. “What are you waiting for? Go after her.”

I’m moving in lurches, staggering like Haymitch, and stare at Finnick’s body as I pass. Everything has gone so wrong.

Before I go much farther, my foot crashes into a root or a hole or something, and my momentum throws me face-first into the mud. Something gives in my knee and I scream. The pain is so intense that I can’t see for a moment. When I can, I look up.

Katniss is kneeling over me, looking down at me, taking me in. Her eyes harden. We both know I’m not going anywhere. Not fast. Not fast at all. “Go for the water,” she hisses, just barely loud enough for me to hear. “I have to catch her before she calms down or she might be ready for me.”

And then she’s gone into the underbrush, running fast and silent, hunting Johanna through the trees like a bloodhound. Like a mutt. My knee hurts like someone’s driven a red-hot spike into it, but that’s not why I want to sob.

The Katniss I love was never real. She’s a story I told myself so I could feel something beautiful. I’m such a good liar I fooled even myself.

My shoulders are shaking. I can’t tell if I’m laughing or crying, but it doesn’t matter.

Somewhere, a cannon thunders.


	9. Chapter 9

Katniss and I have been at the Lady’s house for a few weeks now. We left at the very end of spring, and I’m surprised by the weather. I hadn’t known that District Seven had bright, clear summers that fill the air with light and color, but they do, and when I can keep the windows open or bask outside I’m glad we left Twelve.

The second floor of the house - or the third, I’m not sure whether to count the lowest floor of the building as a floor or a basement when half of it is underground and half isn’t - has a covered walkway wrapped around the three sides of it that don’t attach to the stables or face the hovercraft pad. There are three entrances to the veranda: one is really a whole wall of the big dining room, one is through a door at a landing of the main staircase, and one from a serving room next to the pantry. I guess the Lady wants to be able to have covered, open-air dining sometimes and not have servants clogging up the interior hallways. So far I’ve only seen the veranda used once, when it was pouring down rain and the Lady paced impatiently up and down, obviously as a poor substitute for going walking outside.

It’s become my own little haven. When I’m not working I paint the trees, flowers, and mountains visible from the house, any one of which is more beautiful than most of what Twelve had to offer. Sometimes I’ll just lay on the wooden deck in the sun. Once or twice, I’ve come out here at night when I couldn’t sleep. The house is far enough from the inhabited parts of the District that I could see an entire universe of stars.

Someone dropped a tulip from an arrangement destined for the Lady’s table. Bruised, it was no longer suitable. I  rescued it from the compost bin, and now I’ve set it in the sun, petals glowing a deep orange that darkens to black in the center of the blossom. After experimenting with the paints for a half hour or so, I think I’ve finally mixed the right color. The first stroke of the brush on paper proves me right, and I smile in satisfaction.

I lose myself in the paper and the brush and the light spilling over the tulip, because my baking is done for the day and I have the luxury of time, and the consuming joy of it is so complete that I’m nearly finished when I realize that I’m not alone. That there’s someone else breathing the air behind me, watching me.

Brush still in hand, I turn, and find her leaning against the wall. The shadow of the roof cloaks her from the waist up, which only seems to emphasize the intensity of her stare. It pins me so effectively that I don’t even think about evasion.

Dressed for hunting, Katniss frightens me terribly. The intricate but delicate silver embossing of the black leather armor that encases her torso and arms and legs only adds to the predatory effect of the outfit I’ve seen her wearing around the house since we arrived, and the black metal bow with its gleaming scrollwork of silver and red-gold is just as deadly as the knives that never seem to leave her belt. Deadlier, probably - she has a full quiver of razor-tipped steel arrows over her shoulder, and the few times I’ve seen her shoot, she’s never missed.

It’s like I might cut myself just looking at her, and I can’t look away because she’s still Katniss.

“Hi,” I venture, voice low. Something tells me she doesn’t want anyone else to know we’re here.

“Hello, Peeta.” Her voice is low, too - not just quiet, but deep in her throat and almost a purr. “Is it finished?”

I glance down at the painting. The oranges start fire-bright where the light hits the petals, glow in the mid-tones, and deepen to richer tones in the shadows and the bruised part. I need to add the black center and green of the stem.

“Almost,” I answer, wiping the brush in a rag. “This color is done.”

“Will you give it to me when it is done?” She steps in close to me, close enough that I can feel the heat of her body the way I feel warmth in the sunlight. Close enough that I can smell flowers on her - rose and orchid and lilac and more. Her being that close would scramble my thoughts no matter what, but the contrast between the scent and the rest of what she’s wearing is even more disorienting. Like a wolf smelling like morning loaves.

“If you want it, it’s yours.” I want to move back in my chair so I’m not craning my neck so much. I don’t.

“I do.” Her voice deepens into something I can only call a growl, and her cheeks is almost touching mine when she breathes into my ear. “I want it hanging in my room to remind me.”

My pulse jumps and I feel warmer than the sun can account for. I can’t move. “Remind you of what?” I whisper, eyes fixed on the painting in my lap.

Her hand tangles in my hair hard enough that it hurts, hard enough that I try to cry out, but I can’t because her lips are locked over mine and her tongue is in my mouth and I can’t breathe, much less make a sound. It goes on forever, or maybe just a few seconds, and then she draws back and looks down into my eyes and hers are a burning blue that crushes almost as much air out of me as the kiss. “This,” she hisses softly. “Now finish the painting.”

I’m panting like I just ran a mile, and making my hands do what I want takes concentration. Concentration that she seems intent on disrupting, because she stands so close to me and watches me so intently that I feel hunted. Hounded. Trapped.

Those are not words I expect to make me feel excited.  

I finish the painting in a daze of heat. The black center, the green stem, neither as rich or three-dimensional as the petals. It’s not a choice I would have made myself, but it’s an interesting effect. Like the petals are the most real part of the flower, and the other parts are only there to frame them.

She makes a sound in my ear that I think says she likes that. Or maybe something else. I’m honestly not in any shape to say.

“Done.” My voice cracks just a little, and I flush. Or I would, if I wasn’t already.

She laughs down in her throat in a way that makes me feel warmer and worse at the same time, and takes the painting out of my lap to set it on the edge of the walkway for drying. Then she wheels on me so fast that I would flinch except I don’t have the time because she’s already hauled me up against the wall with her hands in my hair and her mouth against mine and the hard ridges of her armor digging into me through the cloth of my household uniform by the time my reflexes tell me I should.

I twitch and shudder against the wall instead, pinned by her strength, and she laughs into my mouth in that hungry, scary way again while one of her hands tightens in my hair and holds my head back so I have to look up at her and the other slides down over my ribs and over my hip and then inside my pants and I can’t help the tight, desperate sound that comes out of me when her fingers close around me.

She laughs again, low and tight in her own chest, and I’m so painfully aware of how vulnerable I am in her hand that what comes out of me instead of words is a whimper.

Her eyes hold a dark fire, and I search them for any sign of care or gentleness.

If there is any, I can’t see it.

“Katniss,” I finally gasp, torn between the thunder in my pulse and the way my heart wants to pull away and find somewhere dark to hide. “Wait.”

“Why?” she growls into my ear, fingertips flicking over me in a way that bows my spine and turns my vision white for a few seconds. “I know what you want.”

What I want is slow kisses and soft smiles and just a little hesitation to show she cares how I feel. What I want is love-making. This is as far as you can get from that and still have the same motions.

Before my tongue remembers how to make words, she’s dragged me down from the wall to the decking and yanked my pants open. I don’t know what she does to her own clothes, except it seems to be designed to do it, because it only takes a couple of touches of her hand before the heat of her slides along me.

It’s only a few inches of wet heat, but it feels like she’s engulfed all of me, like I’m drowning in her. I push weakly at her hips, trying to get her off, but I might as well be trying to move the moon with my hands. My body is in bliss, acting without me, thrusting up in ragged shudders of urgency before her grip on my hair and the drive of her hips down onto me teaches it her rhythm, and I’ve never felt so good and so wrong.

“Not like this,” I finally gasp into her mouth. “Katniss. Please.”

She growls, low and wild and angry, and her teeth scrape over my lips before she lifts her head enough to look down into my eyes, her braids and loose hair tumbling over my face and blocking out the light. “I can feel you want it,” she breathes, the raw heat in her voice trembling just a little in a way that makes my body jerk up harder into her, and her eyes close for a second or two as her face slackens in pleasure, but when they open again they’re even more wild. “I want it. I want this, you, here, now. You give it to me.”

The words clench around my chest like a vice, like her body around mine, and I close my eyes and give her what she wants. It’s when she arches over me like her bow, screaming so loud that it feels like the whole world must hear, that the mirror of her pleasure rips through me like she’s cut the ecstasy out of me with her knife.

She slumps down over me and pants for a moment, nuzzling my jaw, and I think maybe now it will be tender. We’ll huddle together, she’ll soothe me with her hands and whisper apologies for her roughness, tell me it was urgency and desperation instead of cruelty that I saw in her eyes. Then her weight is gone and my lungs fill with cool air and the light hits me with force and leaves dazzles sparkling in my eyes so that I have to almost close them to see anything at all.. Through my lashes and the brightness, I can see her rearranging her clothes. It doesn’t take her long - she’s immaculate and deadly again in under a minute, and her hands don’t shake.

All of me is shaking.

“‘Anything I want,’” she says, and I don’t feel like she’s talking to me. More like herself. A little as I can see of her face, I know those too-red lips are smiling. “See you again soon, Peeta.”

I clamp my eyes and jaw closed and hold my breath and somehow manage not to give her any of the rest of me. She apparently doesn’t particularly want an answer, because in the wood I feel the vibrations of her footsteps moving away.

By the time I can move or breathe without my chest hurting again, she’s gone and so’s my painting, and the tulip is, too. I think she’s taken it with everything else until I look over the rail and see that splash of vivid orange against the green carpet of the ground below.

She threw it away.


	10. Chapter 10

I wake up in the cell. Scrub the paint off the door again. Fight the guards who come for me, get a needle in the throat for my trouble, get strapped down into the chair in the black room. The collar does something, and the drug-fog clears in an instant.

The room is silent except for the very faint sound of the computers. I wait for Minerva to say something, or turn on the machine, or show me a holo of something horrible.

Nothing happens.

I wait another hundred heartbeats before I decide that I’m alone. This has never happened before. Minerva is always in the room when I’m brought, even if I can’t see or hear her at first.

Dread settles in my stomach. What could it mean? Is this another way to scare and manipulate me? Is someone _else_ going to torture me?

Did something happen to her? Did she get caught up in some other atrocity and forget about me?

I blink, and even though I’m still terrified, I laugh. Here I am, freaked out that my torture hasn’t started on time. That my torturer - excuse me, Miss Snow, _technician_ \- might be losing interest in me or in trouble. Because her personal well-being is _so_ very important to me.

The laughter picks up a hysterical edge that echoes back to me off the walls when I realize that it _is_ important to me, that Minerva Snow has become the only constant and secure thing left in the world I inhabit. The _only_ thing I can reasonably expect won’t be snatched away or changed at someone else’s whim.

That I’m _used_ to her, now. That in some way, I need her.

The door slams open, the boom of it flat and strange in the room - for some reason, some sounds echo in here and some don’t, and the door sounds like it can’t make up its mind - and I hear muffled heels on the indeterminate floor and the sound of someone breathing hard with rage and I know that she’s here. I don’t know how I know that that’s her breathing and not someone else’s, but I do.

“Missed you,” I say, the words tumbling out on the end of a laugh.

“I was unavoidably detained,” she snaps out, her hands swirling the air around her in enormous, expansive frustration. Her eyes are gray fire. They drag enough of my attention away from the tangle of broken furniture in my head that I don’t have to think about how much I desperately don’t want to have meant those words. How much I did mean them.

“Looks like nothing good.” I’ve never seen her angry like this. I don’t think. Maybe I have. It’s hard to tell sometimes.

It makes my pulse jump, and not entirely with fear, and I don’t want to be thinking that she’s beautiful when she’s angry and I wish I could paint her. That is the thing I want to think least in the world at this moment, but I go right on thinking it in spite of myself.

“No. No. Nothing good.” Her nails flash splinters of silver light, everything about her in restless motion, her hip-length hair swirling in the dimness like a liquid shadow. “Damn them. _Damn_ them. I could end all of this if they’d just let me!”

For the moment I remember that she and her older sisters help rule Panem. It has to be them, or Snow, or both. “So crazy is at the helm again, I take it?” It is a really bad sign that I’m thinking of her as reasonable.

“You might say that. You could definitely say that.” Her laugh is raw and jagged and full of sharp edges. “I couldn’t possibly comment, of course. But I was detained by an argument which I most assuredly did not win, and now everyone is going to suffer for it.”

I make a sympathetic noise. “What was the argument about?” My voice is measured, concerned but not prying. I really do not want her to stay this angry.

Her lips peel back over her teeth like she’s going to dismiss the question, then compress into a thin line for a moment, and then she spends what feels like a small eternity chewing on the edge of her lip in a small thinking tell that she might not even know she has. Then the words come boiling out of her like chestnuts bursting because they haven’t been vented before being put in the fire. “Everything. My sister Juno sits in her spider’s nest and crafts muttation after muttation, dozens and hundreds and thousands of new pods to turn this city into her own personal arena, and she can spare the time to craft an entire new _breed_ that will hunt Katniss Everdeen’s scent to the ends of the earth, but can she be bothered to say anything about the uprising except to urge killing them all? No, of course not - that would require distraction from her precious pets and projects. Diana seems to think that war is the greatest game ever invented, and all she _talks_ about is body counts and penetrator missiles and tables of _crīsāre_ organization and how she’s going to see the revolution crushed under the boots of her Peacekeepers, as if it will do anyone any good to rule over an empire of nothing but bodies. And my _father._...”

Her voice snaps off into a rasping, shivering breath as she tries to get hold of her temper. I think she’s trying to convince herself that she ought to stop talking, because even if I’m a prisoner strapped to a torture rack, anyone in her position talking like this is risking their life on every word.

I’ve been here for probably weeks, I never feel hungry, and I remember exactly one meal. I’m the perfect audience. I just need to find the words to remind her of that.

“You’ll tell me or you won’t,” I say gently. “You can not say it at all, or talk to a wall. Though the walls are probably a bigger security risk than I am, at this point. They’re way more credible.”

“And more likely to be electronically monitored,” she murmurs, fingers tracing the air slowly as though she’s molding clay or dough. Finally she lets out her air, her eyes close, and she speaks in the kind of whisper Katniss used in the Arena when she didn’t want the cameras to hear. “My father has lost his mind. Coin has an army we never suspected, the districts are in open revolt that Diana’s thrashing about is only making worse, and my father talks of nothing but the Mockingjay. Which means he talks to me of nothing at all, except to give orders. To ask the impossible, the mutually contradictory, the pointlessly small, and to ask all of it yesterday. He’s always at least listened to my advice before, but since the Quell he’s as mad in his own way as Juno and Diana are in theirs.”

“Oh.” I swallow. Part of me hopes that Snow being crazy will help the rebels. Most of me is afraid of the damage it will probably do to them and, well, everyone else. “That is bad.”

“Yes.” Her eyes still closed, she sways on her feet, and it makes her hair and her clothes move like oil on dark water. “This war can’t be won on the streets of the districts or the avenues of the Capitol. It has to be won by inches in the only place that matters - the hearts and the minds of the people. My sisters can’t understand that, and my father is so obsessed with the symbol of the discontent that’s caught fire that he no longer sees that she’s just one piece in the game. Sometimes the queen isn’t the most important piece on the board - just the most obvious.”

It occurs to me that she means Katniss. It sends a shudder through me that could be longing or could be revulsion. I’m not sure. Maybe both.

“She has strong effects on people,” I say wryly.

A softer laugh, this time, and when her eyes open and look into mine it almost feels like there’s a kinship there. “I know,” she murmurs. “But to you and I, she’s Katniss. Not the Mockingjay, the symbol of the rebellion, the warrior angel of District 13 who’ll lay down her life for the new rightful ruler of Panem. Just Katniss. Just the girl who wanted to hunt in the woods and protect her family.”

I frown. She’s never been ‘just’ anything to me, but the way Minerva talks about her seems to dissolve some of the loving dread. It’s a tiny glow of clarity that gets swallowed again almost instantly.

“Right,” I say, unsure.

“It lets us see her clearly,” she keeps explaining, hands tracing the air, and I realize with a jolt that it’s Katniss’s face she’s tracing the lines of with those silver-clawed fingers. “Lets us value her for what she actually is. Would you think Katniss’s life was a fair trade for the destruction of the Capitol? Coin does. For the restoration of peace? My father thinks so. But I wouldn’t trade her for either, because I know she isn’t the whole game but a piece, just a piece, made of something precious enough to be worth stealing off the board and keeping held tight in your hand forever and ever.”

The possessiveness in her voice crawls over my skin, making me feel a little sick, even though I’m not the prize possession.

Except, I realize with a jolt, that I’m the closest thing to Katniss that Minerva has at the moment. Why is murky - because I’ve kissed her? Because of the awful things she’s done to me in and out of the arena? Because I’ve known her so long? Because I love her?

Because I love her. My insides tighten up with the shock of understanding.

Because Minerva loves her and she thinks that makes us a little bit the same.

I swallow again, looking away. “So what impossible, contradictory things does he want?”

She sighs softly, as if the anger has left her tired now that it’s finally gone. “He wants to continue my work with you as the voice of reason to the people and is willing to allow me my other designs, but he also wants you to be visibly suffering. Damaged. He wants Katniss to see you thinner and weaker and ruined, and getting worse all the time. It’s going to be extremely unpleasant and entirely counterproductive, but those are his orders.”

All the air goes out of me. When I get it back, my voice is a little desperate. “Portia can’t fake it?”

“Not all of it. She can’t remove weight, and even you aren’t a good enough actor for what he wants.” She sighs again, moves in closer to me, brushes her lips lightly against my forehead. “It’s folly and it’s vulgar, but I can’t stop it. I’d only get you removed from my care permanently if I tried. At best.”

My heart drops into my stomach. “Oh.”

Her fingertips stroke my face, and it’s tender, and for some reason that makes me want to cry instead of scream. I manage not to do either. “We have a lot of work to do very quickly before I hand you over to his people,” she whispers. “There are memories it won’t do for them to stumble across. Not for either of us.”

Even with everything, I still manage a snort. “The good days are when I remember my own name.”

“Then we’ll have to make sure your next few days are bad ones for memory, as well as everything else.” She laughs softly, sharing the grim humor of the joke, and it frightens me that part of me wants to beg her to hide me here somehow. That I’d rather be tortured by her than President Snow’s choice.

I don’t have time to ask myself when I became so ready to be grateful to the one person who’s hurt me the most before the collar prickles my neck and hisses. The drugs drown me in dark water.

The last things I see are the flecks of blue in the gray irises of Minerva’s eyes.


	11. Chapter 11

I’m on delivery rounds, trudging through a fine rain with a tarp-covered bundle of bread and rolls and muffins I need to keep dry, and when I see the rainbow I almost don’t stop. I’m cold and uncomfortable and my mouth tastes like coal dust, but after a few seconds I give in and stare. The arc of color - so many colors, shimmering and shining in the air - is mesmerizing in its beauty. I don’t remember ever seeing something so clear and glittering.

I want to re-create it somehow, but I’d need to be able to paint with light. So I look at it as long as I dare. I wish I could show it to Katniss. That it would move her the same way it moves me. That sharing the beauty would make her see me as more than another town kid.

Someone knocks into me and I have lunge forward to keep hold of the bread. Too far - I wind up with both knees in the mud, cold water soaking me from mid-thigh down.

At least the bread is safe. My family can’t afford to lose a whole delivery load.

Someone is laughing at me. Rough. Masculine. Familiar.

Gale.

“If you have so much trouble staying on your feet,” he sneers somewhere behind me, “maybe you should just stay down there.”

Carefully, I get to my feet, making sure my back isn’t to Gale as I do. “Maybe you should watch where you’re going.”

His eyes narrow, but he doesn’t come at me. Maybe he’s thinking about the fact that even in a back-alley, there’s not much to keep sound from carrying in District Twelve. Or maybe he’s just working up to it.

Another laugh mingles with the slowly thickening patter of the rain, and my back stiffens, because it’s Katniss. Katniss is laughing. Gale shifts to look back over his shoulder, and I see her leaned against one wall of the alley with the rain slipping through her fine black hair. It makes her shine a little in the broken light.

“Guess the baker boy might have a point. Big guy like you might walk right over him if you’re not paying attention,” Katniss needles us.

The jibe about my height - or lack thereof - hurts more coming from her. I start walking away towards a bigger street, one ear turned back in case they decide to follow.

“You going to let him turn his back on me like that?” Katniss says, which is the only warning I get before Gale comes slamming into me. It’s enough to shove the bread on top of a pile of half-broken crates and turn enough so he doesn’t hit me right in the spine. Not enough to keep him from knocking me to the ground.

Not enough to stop the first half-dozen punches he puts into my face and chest while his weight bears down on top of me.

Eventually I get arms up to block and throw a punch of my own. It knocks Gale’s head to the side, and I heave upwards with my legs and other arm to unbalance him. I manage to get my feet only to be caught by Gale’s bull rush that crushes me against a wall and knocks the breath out of me.

He goes back to hitting me. I think I hear Katniss laughing.

I know that when it’s done, when I’m lying on the ground in a pool of blood and mud and water while I watch Gale walk away from me, it’s Katniss who puts the kick into my ribs that makes me sob and knocks the bread from the boxes into the mud.

* * *

 Hunger radiates outwards from my stomach and pulls the rest of me in. I’m curled up on my side, the hardness of the bench magnified enough that I’m surprised when I still feel the flimsy cushion under my hand.  

As I wake up I begin to be aware of other things. The half-congealed wounds on my lower lip, right eyebrow, and nose. Tender puffiness around my right eye that suggests a livid bruise. Cuts and welts on my wrists that have to be from metal shackles or cuffs rather than leather straps.

Spam-in-a-can, or someone like him. Probably. I don’t remember much. I think I’m glad.

Under the wounds, my arms look bonier. I guess the starvation program is working.

The paintings have changed. If anything, they’re more meticulously applied than before, but there are little wavers in the brushwork that make me wonder if I was close to fainting when I painted them. Assuming I painted them. Katniss over my bed is even more coldly lethal now, her bow pointed directly at me, but the biggest change is her outfit - body armor, black and white and elegantly designed, evocative. Mockingjay. I know one of Cinna’s designs anywhere. If it weren’t for my stomach trying to eat my lungs and spine, I’d probably be either terrified or inspired. Maybe both. As it is, it’s just vaguely disturbing.

The floor is its usual cheery depiction of a mass grave. Suddenly I imagine Minerva sitting over tea, planning the next horrible alterations to my cell, deep in thought over which elements to change like she’s planning a garden. She even chews the corner of her lip. It’s attractive in a way that makes me absolutely sure that I’m delusional with hunger.

A single, weak laugh escapes me.

The side walls have changed, too. Effie and Haymitch and Finnick and everyone else are running through a forest of grasping trees now, being pursued by shadowy things whose touch burns and melts everything they brush against, the ruin of their wake spreading out toward a horizon where District Twelve - I know it by the shape of the mountains behind it - is still burning. It fills me not with rage or distress but sadness. I’m never going to see home again, or be able to help my friends again. It’s just that I’m so far from being able to help anyone that I can’t get worked up about it. Just regret. I wonder if that’s the point.

I turn away before I give away any more of myself to the cameras or the sensors or however it is that she’s watching me.

The other wall, the one facing Johanna’s room, is such a relief that I search for the hidden horror for a long time before I decide that it’s supposed to be soothing. Another manipulation, no question, but I’ll take what I can get. It’s a beautiful old forest, snow on the ground and evergreens mixed in with their skeletal, sleeping cousins, the land trailing up toward the distant bulk of a dark building nestled at the top of the hill, its windows streaming light out into the night that doesn’t drown the stars spreading across the sky. It looks quiet and peaceful, if a little cold.

The door’s portrait is back, like it always is. This time Katniss looks...hungry.

I shiver and look away. Maybe I’m just projecting because I’m seriously considering gnawing my leg off to get some relief. It would lower my nutrition requirements at the same time, even.

“That’s it, Peeta, you’re officially nuts,” I tell myself out loud. I don’t know if I feel lucky or not that nobody answers. It’s probably saner, but it’s still lonely.

Maybe being delusional will at least be good company.

I sit on the bench, legs pulled up under myself. My mind wanders for a while before my attention snaps on to my feet.

Both of my feet are crusted with blood. I frown. A quick inspection confirms that I don’t have any broken skin below the waist.

The pattern wouldn’t be right for my own blood, anyway. It’s on my soles and between my toes, under my toenails, a few splashes up on my arches and ankles.

Like I’d been walking in a pool of blood.

Blood flowing across the floor from the table. I’m shackled to a chair only a yard away and can’t move. Darius’s tongueless screams ricocheting off the tiled walls and piercing my brain. They’re literally taking him apart in front of me. I want to close my eyes but they do something to the collar that won’t let me do more than blink. I watch the leading edge of the blood getting closer and closer to my feet, flinch at the lukewarm feel of it on my skin. I can’t move.

It’s the fourth day of this. I can’t tell time any more but they make sure to tell me.

A half-scream, half-sob wrenches me a little bit out of the memory, but not enough. I cry for a long time.

 _Vulgar,_ Minerva said before I was taken from her. I don’t remember much, but I remember that. It’s not a big enough word. There aren’t words big or horrible enough.

They were going to kill Lavinia the same way. She was lucky. Electrical shock. Bang. Dead. Stopped her heart. Just like that.

Lucky. Fast. I’m so exhausted from the grief and the hunger and the hurt that I don’t know if I fall asleep or just collapse, if I’m awake or dreaming, if I’ve hit the floor or I’m still on the bench.

I don’t know anything. Just like Lavinia and Darius. I’m just being hurt to hurt someone else.

Katniss.

* * *

I’m cold, but more than that I’m hungry. I haven’t been hungry for days.

The berries. Katniss tricking me. I sit up with a jolt.

She’s right next to me, slumped on the ground, blood covering her face. I have a moment of panic before I figure out that it’s from a closing cut on her forehead that only looks frightening. Her breathing is slow and even, and I clean her face in gentle little dabs to let her sleep.

I’m hungry, and I can think and move. That, more than the hypodermic needle on the ground, between us is proof that her gamble worked. She got the medicine. I’m not dying of infection any more.

She saved my life. The knowledge sets a quiet, warm joy pulsing in my chest.

For a little while longer, we can both be safe. Together.

Safe.

* * *

“You’re safe now, Peeta.” Voice. Familiar. Portia. I’m damp but warm. Showered? Dressed. I’m dressed. Nothing is screaming in pain - it’s just that everything aches like a badly set bone. All I want to do is lay down and go to sleep and never wake up.

Gentle hands shake me again. “You’re safe, Peeta,” Portia tells me again, “but you need to do an interview. Help me get you ready.”

My eyes open slowly. Portia is placidly happy, with a hint of frustration at my semi-consciousness, as if I’m putting her out to be petulant. As if barely being able to control my own body is something I’m doing to annoy her.

A mirror on the wall behind her catches my reflection, and I freeze at what I see. I watch my own expression turn to shock.

I look starved, bruised, terrified, exhausted, and confused. Exactly like I should. Exactly like Snow wants me to look. To hurt Katniss.

There’s no way Portia could ignore my state. No way she can’t know what it means.

“What did they do to you?” I blurt out. “It’s like they took your soul.”


	12. Chapter 12

Portia stares back at me blankly, like I’ve spoken in some foreign language that she can’t understand, and reaches for her make-up brush. Before I’ve decided to do it, my hands are wrapped around her wrists and I repeat the question. It’s only when my voice echoes back to me off the walls that I realize I’ve screamed.

_What did they do to you do to you do to you you you you you._

“Peeta,” she whispers, eyes huge and confused, “stop it. You’re hurting me.”

With huge effort I release her wrists, swallow, get my voice to a volume that doesn’t hurt. “You cared about me, once upon a time. Before the Quell. You even liked me before my first Games. We were friends.” I take a shaky breath. “You cared. And now you don’t. That doesn’t just happen, Portia. They’ve done something to you.”

“Peeta! Why would you say something like that?” She looks wounded, like I’ve been a brute to her for no reason and she can’t understand why.  “Of course I care about you. You’re my tribute. We are friends. Why are you being this way?”

I have to glance back in the mirror to fight off the uncertainty that her question brings. No. I’m not being crazy, not about this.

“Portia. They starved me. Beat me. Made me watch them torture someone to death. It shows. They made sure it did. And it doesn’t bother you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says earnestly. “You look very good. Slimmed down. It’ll be fashionable next season. Who are these people who you think have been hurting you? I’ll tell Lady Snow, she’ll see they’re punished.”

Now I see that I was wrong. It wasn’t her caring they changed. It was her idea of reality.

It shouldn’t comfort me - it should fill me with rage. But there’s nothing I can do to help anyone any more, and if they had to make Portia crazy at least she’s still gentle.

If I’m really honest with myself, it also makes me feel less alone. There’s too much I don’t remember. When I try to fumble through my head looking for the lost bits, it’s like being in a dark room where the floor shifts and the broken pieces of the furniture slam into me and bruise me.

I sigh. Maybe Portia’s saner than I am, at this point.

“Don’t worry about it, Portia. They were probably just nightmares.” She gives me a final uncertain look, then seems to decide to get back to work on my make-up and hair. Once she’s done that, her face smooths out noticeably, and she starts to hum cheerfully to herself while she works. It’s like watching the ripples vanish from the surface of a lake, until it’s like they were never there.

She’s masterful as always. It’s just that she doesn’t seem to notice all the damage that needs covering up. The result is perversely worse than if she’d done nothing at all, like putting a fresh coat of bright paint on something with holes visibly rusted through it. It just draws attention to how bad I look.

The door opens, and Minerva’s dress hisses on the floor. She’s carrying an armful of orange tulips, which she carefully arranges in a vase beside the mirror. “Very good work, Portia,” she says, as if there’s nothing wrong in the world.

“Thank you, my lady!” Portia practically trills, bright as noon sunshine. “He’s looking very good.”

I allow myself an eye roll. Minerva’s lips twitch. I have the sudden, perverse feeling of intimacy that comes from being in on a shared secret with someone. I wonder if she finds it hard to keep a straight face in the face of Portia’s cheerfulness. I wonder why I care, too, but not as emphatically.

“Is he ready?”

“Yes, my lady.” Portia gives me a final straightening, then nods her approval. “He’ll knock them dead.”

“I’ve no doubt he will. You may go, Portia.”

Portia is still standing behind me, brows gently pinched, like she’s trying very hard to remember something. I watch her in the mirror. “My lady...” she says slowly, and Minerva turns to her in a swirl of ebony cloth and silver bangles. Portia’s eyes squint a little, like she’s trying to pick something out of a bright light. “There was something....”

“That you needed to tell me?” Minerva invites softly.

“Yes!” Portia nods, her expression almost dreamy, like a flashlight spreading in a deep fog. “Something important. About Peeta.”

Minerva waits like the night under the horizon - infinitely patient.

“I think someone is... hurting him. Somehow. He said they beat him and did... something else. He seems a little hungry.”

It twists in my chest, hearing her try to drag her concern for me through the impossible fog of her mind. What’s left of her mind. It makes me regret every time I was ever impatient or difficult with her, that I never told her how much I valued her caring about me while I could. While she could still understand me.

“I’ll take care of everything, Portia. It’s nothing you need to worry about. Focus on your duties.” I watch Portia twitch ever so gently, as if each phrase is closing a vent I can’t see inside her, and her expression empties out in a way that reminds me of Johanna right before I... before. Under the drugs.

“You’ll take care of everything. It’s nothing I need to worry about. I’ll focus on my duties.” Portia nods, a beatific smile spreading over her face. “Have a good show, Peeta,” she tells me in that same vague, sleepwalking voice, and then turns and leaves without looking back.

“Do I get like that?” I can’t help but ask. “Is that what it looks like from the outside?”

“Not like that. No.” Minerva settles herself against the table in front of the big mirror, tracing silver nails over the tulips lightly. “You were in the hospital for a little while, and my father’s need to borrow you has been costing me time with you. Not to mention his personal requests for your handling. Besides, some people are just simpler devices than others.”

She’s angry about it. The same way you’re angry when someone else makes a mess of your kitchen.

“Is that your goal? Making me like Portia?”

“Perhaps, in the way that a multi-tool is like a hammer.” She smiles faintly. “Your ability to reason is too finely tuned and useful for me to want to break it. Too necessary. And I’d never want you to be so easy to adjust.”

My mouth twists in disgust. “No magic off-switch for me? Thanks, I guess.”

It comes out less ironic than I meant it to. A new reason to hate myself. Especially knowing that she destroyed Portia’s reason and plans to make me a special kind of crazy.

“It does, you must admit, make for easier handling.” She smiles faintly, reaching out to brush her fingertips through the space over my cheek again. “You look dreadful.” The way she says it sounds frightening close to _I’m sorry._

“No shit.”

“The first thing you’ll have when I get you back, my _mendacem_ , is a decent meal and a real night’s sleep. Then the medics will have a look at you,” she promises me, as if promises could mean anything between us.

Except it does. I believe her.

“After this interview?” No one’s ever told me how many times I have to look awful on screen. I can only hope it’s almost over.

Over. Ha. Back to a more comfortable torture, more like.

“I hope so,” she murmurs, and I would swear that if I wasn’t wearing makeup, she’d kiss me. I can’t tell if it’s relief or disappointment that almost brings tears to my eyes when she straightens up and glances at the door. I blink the feeling away, think about how hungry I am. It’s not hard.  

“There’s no point in giving you a complex script to perform - your memory and your energy are both too battered to manage it. This time, the message is simple. Use your own words. You’ll know what to say.” The door opens, and I can see Peacekeepers waiting outside in the hall. Their armor is white, not black.

“Sweet dreams,” Minerva tells me as she watches me walk unsteadily to the door, and if there’s not a real note of frustrated sadness in her voice, they should have her doing shows instead of Caesar.

 


	13. Chapter 13

Some sound wakes me. I blink, shield my eyes from the brightness, look around the cell. Nothing but the usual fixtures, the paintings, and me.

I hold my breath, listening.

It comes again. It’s almost not a sound - a deep vibration that I feel in the floor and walls.

Is the Capitol under attack?

For a while, there aren’t any more sounds. The hunger distracts me from speculation. I sit with my eyes closed, arms wrapped around my stomach, glad it’s easy not to think. There are still spots of Darius’s blood staining the cushion.

Some time later, the door opens. I’m not sure what I expect, but it isn’t Gale. He’s in some grey uniform and holding a gun. Someone else is standing in the hallway in a guard position.

I blink up at him, confused and wary.

“Can you walk?” His voice sounds strange, and then I realize he’s angry. I don’t understand why.

I nod, waver to my feet. He steps in and gets his arm under me, and I feel warm blood against my side. He’s hurt and bleeding, but he takes my weight anyway. Starts hauling me out of my cell.

Out of my cell. The last thing I see of it is Katniss with her bow pointed straight at our hearts.

One of the others in the gray uniform trots over and takes me from Gale, glaring at him. “Soldier Hawthorne, you’re barely fit for walking duty, much less carrying.”

“Yeah, well, look after him. If something happens to him, Katniss will kill us.” Gale bares his teeth in a smile that’s got pain and anger and jealousy in it, but suddenly I don’t care because I see Johanna. Battered, torn up, unconscious but alive. Johanna.

I reach my free hand out to touch her shoulder. She’s solid and real under my fingers.

The group whisks us down a series of corridors, up a maintenance ladder, and out to a waiting hovercraft. The current in the ladder is the only thing keeping Johanna and me on it.

Gunshots explode outside, and a few pound the hull as we rise into the air. I flinch but don’t move from Johanna’s side on the floor.

“Strap in,” Gale commands me. I shake my head.

“If we stay in the air, I don’t need to. I don’t want to survive a crash.” I haven’t let go of Johanna’s hand. “She wouldn’t either.”

Gale stares at me for a minute, like maybe he’s seeing me for the first time, and then slowly reaches down and unhooks his own restraints. “What happened in there?” he murmurs, voice raw and quiet with shock.

Somewhere outside, the world sounds like it’s trying to come to an end, but in here there’s just me and Johanna and Gale and the soldiers trying to pretend they aren’t watching us. It’s strangely peaceful.

I shrug. “Pain. Horror. Death. What you’d expect.” If he’d ever been a tribute, I wouldn’t have to explain. Just like the Arena, the only important fact is that you survived. It’s just that nobody will be watching video of Johanna’s and my fight to stay alive and commenting on it and thinking it means something for them.

I don’t know if it’s relief or despair that brings me to silent, shaking tears as the pitch of the hovercraft’s engines builds to a scream.

 

* * *

 

After a long debate with myself, I decide to bring Katniss her favorite cheese buns. A few days have passed, and she hasn’t said a word to me. We haven’t been alone together, so maybe if I catch her in a private moment we can talk.

Maybe I can find out what, exactly, I am to her. If I knew, I might be able to figure out how to cope.

Strong, early-evening sun streams in the windows at an angle as I pack up the buns and go to her room. It’s the only time of day that she’s reliably in the house and awake.

Her door is open. I knock on the frame, but a quick glance finds no one. It’s a smaller space than I expected - maybe an eight-foot cube, altogether, windowless and lit only by the soft crystalline fire of glow-lights built into the walls. The walls are painted in dark colors, muted greens and blacks and browns, and I stare at the subtle patterns for a while until I realize it’s a forest - a dark, fog-drenched, murky forest so far out of focus it feels like a dream. I have to drag my eyes away from it, and it’s hard not to look back. I settle for itemizing what’s in the room as a distraction.

Weapon racks, dark metal, various, six. Swords, bows, snares, knives, spears - mostly bows and knives. All elegant, all a subtle kind of ornate, all deadly. A collection. I don’t think Katniss knows how to use half of this stuff. I don’t want to imagine the possibility that I’m wrong.

Armor rack, heavy-grain wood in deep brown, one. Empty right now, but it has the right shape and number of slots for what Katniss was wearing when she found me on the veranda. My chest tightens and I look at the next thing.

Small dresser, same wood, heavy varnish, one. The drawers have locks.

Door in the wall, slightly ajar. Hint of racks inside. A walk-in closet? It must be more than half the width of the room, and I think I see a corner and a vanishing wall. There might be more space in there than in here. Clothes? Yet more weapons?

My painting hangs on the wall beside the closet door, the bruised petals brilliant in the shine of a glow-light she’s turned up to a white spotlight, the rest reduced to almost insubstantial strokes of color.

It’s a little easier to breathe, looking at it. It’s evidence that something besides my body interests her.

I stand there, wondering if it would be better to leave the buns on her dresser, put them back in the kitchen, or look for her elsewhere. I’m halfway through leaving when I stop short and look back in. A second look confirms it.

There’s no bed.

I frown. I and all the other servants have beds - thick mattresses, lush comforters, luxury completely unattainable to anyone growing up in District Twelve. A punishment? But there’s no space where a bed used to be, and I can’t imagine the Lady doing something so inefficient. Maybe it’s hidden? One of the maids has a bunk that folds out of the wall - she likes to brag about how our Lady gave it to her particularly. Before all the many, many reasons I should be backing out into the hall can catch up to me, I’ve set the buns on the dresser and started examining the walls again. I don’t know why it’s so important to me to prove to myself that Katniss has a bed, but it is, very, so I search the walls with my hands for a seam. The back wall, once I’m past the armor rack - that’s the spot where there’s empty space.

I find a seam, then a slight imperfection next to it. When I look hard at the spot, I think I can make out an impression of an owl in gray and black and amber mixed into the murk. I try pressing just under the owl’s talons, where the imperfection is.

The wall swings silently away from me, opening onto a small stone landing with narrow stairs leading upward, curving right over the top of the hidden door.

I blink. The layout of the house flashes in my head from the orientation video. The floor above this one is for the Lady and her special guests only. Even the cleaning crews can only go at specific times.

There’s only one reason to have a hidden staircase from Katniss’s room to the Lady’s floor. Especially with no bed in this room.

Carefully, I close the door, which is made a lot harder by the trembling in my hands. I stand there for a moment, arms braced hard against the wall, trying to un-believe the realization that’s freezing into hard barbed edges in my chest. That Katniss is here as the Lady’s lover or consort or whatever name they pick.

After the veranda, I don’t feel like I’m overstepping a boundary by opening the hidden door again. Or, if I am, I don’t care.

I don’t know what keeps me from turning back down the stairs when I see the door standing open just a little ways, hear Katniss’s laughter dancing in the air.

Katniss almost never laughed back home in Twelve. I’ve never heard her laugh like this - bright and sure of herself and teasing. It drags me in against the wall behind the hidden door that I’m too afraid to peek through, keeps me from running when I know someone could open it and find me at any moment.

“Coyness doesn’t suit you.” Our Lady’s voice, low and husky and full of her own laughter. “Come, my _venatrix_ , let me see you.”

“I’m covered in deer blood, dirt and sweat. I’ll ruin your rugs and sheets again.” Katniss’s voice is rough smoke, laughter abating into something darker and hungrier. Almost taunting.

“I don’t care about them.” Our Lady’s voice again, sharper this time, jagged with urgency. “The armor can be cleaned, the rugs aired, the sheets washed or discarded. I want you, now, without waiting. Fresh from the hunt. Let me see you.”

I close my eyes and dig my nails into my hands and try not to imagine Katniss’s clever hands at the clasps of her armor. Peeling away the bodysuit. Laying her weapons aside. The more I try not to, the more every sound from inside that room conjures up the images I so desperately want to believe are lies.

There’s a sound from the bed like a woman in pain. Katniss laughs again, and this time the only word I can find for it is wicked. “Is that what you want to see, _domina_?”

“You are incomparable,” our Lady breathes, so harshly I can barely understand the words. Then her voice changes, hardens, gains familiar authority. It feels like a whip cracked next to my skin. “Enough games, now. Come to me.”

I hear the springs of the bed creak. A gasp - Katniss, high in her throat, startled, and then Katniss again: a taut, shivering moan. Our Lady’s sigh of delight. Sheets twisting against skin.

“My _venatrix_. My Katniss,” our Lady whispers, almost too quiet for me to hear over the sounds of what’s happening just a few feet from me. “Perfect and mine, entirely.”

“Yes, always,” she murmurs back - reverently, if a little breathless. “There’s no one but you.”

Silently, I curl around the pain in my chest. I’ve stopped caring about getting caught. It’s not like the punishment could be worse than this.

 

* * *

 

There’s something beeping near my head. I want it to stop so I can sleep, but my arms are too heavy. There’s something taped to my left hand. I wonder if this is how Minerva’s trying to nurse me back to health.

Then I realize that I can hear someone else’s breathing. I fight to open my eyes.

I’m in a hospital room. In a bed. Sheets. Clothes. A paper cup of water on a table where I can reach it.

This isn’t the Capitol. Gale and his team saved us - I remember now.

I remember.

There are three other beds in this room, only one occupied by Johanna. It was her breathing I heard. She still looks awful, but better. Her face is relaxed like she isn’t in pain any more.

I have no idea where I am, but I don’t care. We’re safe.

The water is good. I start to think about getting out of bed, finding more. Finding food. Talking because I feel like it.

I wait for a while, though. I guess I’m in the habit.

The door opens and a doctor comes in. Checks the others, checks me, gives me a reassuring smile. She’s pretty in a quiet sort of way. Way too old for me, though.

I smile back, because it’s good to know my sense of humor is more intact than the rest of me.

The doctor moves to Johanna, and then starts back over toward me, two more of her colleagues coming through the door with small flashlights already out. I’m about to be examined - again - and I wish I could say I’m indignant, but I honestly just don’t care. I’m not hungry anymore, and I don’t hurt anymore, and the lassitude of the exhaustion that’s not in my flesh or skin but in my bones makes it hard to remember that I get to have an opinion.

The door opens again, and I look up reflexively. Freeze.

“Katniss.”

She isn’t bruised and dirty and terrified like she was the last time I saw her. Her skin and hair just about glow with how clean and healthy she looks. Even the drab gray jumpsuit she’s wearing doesn’t detract from how beautiful she is.

Even though her eyes are locked on to me like I’m the only thing in the world, she doesn’t say anything. She just comes toward me, one step at a time, walking at first and then running like I might vanish if she doesn’t get to me in time.

I push the doctors aside, stand on shaky feet. Then she’s in my arms and my lips are on hers and I don’t care about anything else. It’s a long moment before we decide that breathing is kind of important. I grin goofily at her.

She stares down at me, blinking back tears, then gives me a gentle shake like she wants to do it harder but thinks I might break in half if she does. “If you _ever_ leave my sight again,” she promises with the utmost sincerity, “I will kill you, Peeta Mellark.”

Arms wrapped around her, I chuckle into her hair. “Promise?”

She chokes on a sound that’s probably a sob, but I can’t see her face because it’s pressed against my hair now. “I promise,” she whispers. “I promise. I promise.”

We stand in each other’s arms for long time. The doctor coughs impatiently behind me.

“Let’s go.” I don’t care where.

I think that sound one of the doctors just made is outrage. Katniss laughs, though, and gives them a look that says that if she’ll kill me for leaving her sight, they don’t want to be the people who try to make me. I think they might believe her, because they let her take me right out of that room.

I don’t really remember the hallways we go through or the elevator that takes us down, but it’s not because I’m drugged or losing time. At least, not unless Katniss’s mouth and hands and warmth count as a drug. Probably they should. I’m laughingly giddy by the time she pushes me in through a door to a private room - not much, just a couple of narrow bunks and hard walls and a dresser and a little table, but it doesn’t remind me of my cell at all because Katniss is here and she’s kissing me again.

 _That_ wouldn’t be allowed in my cell. Not without Minerva’s written approval. I’m laughing, and it’s a little hysterical, but Katniss is holding me and it quiets back down into ragged chuckles again. I know that as long as she’s holding me, I’m not going to come apart.

The kissing gets more heated, and I am transfixed by Katniss’s skin as she unzips the jumpsuit and lets it fall to the ground. She strokes my hair as I kiss my way down her throat to taste her breasts.

My lips stop at her collarbone. Trace it. She makes a sound in her throat that’s almost pleading. I’ve never heard her make a sound like that before. It feels like floating in fire.

Her eyes are stormy when I look up. “Whatever you want, Katniss,” I murmur against her skin. “I love you. You had me with one shot.”

The black of her pupils expands in the blue of her irises - desire? - and then keeps expanding until it swallows the color of her eyes entirely. Her breath goes out of her in a long, slow shudder, her head twitching slightly like she’s trying to look away and can’t, and then she smiles - placid, peaceful, distant. It looks terribly wrong on her face.

“Whatever I want,” she murmurs. “You love me. I had you with one shot.” Another slow, almost languid shudder, and the blue comes back into her eyes. “Yes. Of course. Thank you, Peeta.”

Pulse pounding in my ears, I hold her gently by the arms, frantically searching her face. “Katniss? Are you all right? What happened?”

“I forgot.” She bends and kisses me lightly, tracing my lips with her mouth. “There are so many important things I need to remember and do, and I forgot. You reminded me. Thank you. What would I do without you?”

Horror fills me. It was one of Minerva’s triggers, I’m sure of it. And she used me to activate it - used me as the knife to cut Katniss out of herself. Like Portia.

I wish Gale had left me in my cell.

“What things, Katniss?” I ask, anguished. “What did you remember?”

“Everything I need to.” She smiles, bright and fierce, and it’s a falcon’s smile. _All falcons fight their traces at first,_ I hear Minerva say in the back of my mind, and I want to scream or run, but I can’t. I have to try to help Katniss. Fix this. Somehow. She’s still talking, and I try to focus. “We have so much to do together, but the first thing I have to do is the most important, because I have to do it for you.”

I flinch, reflexively checking her hands for weapons. There are none, but I know I’m still in danger. I only have half a second to realize that it’s another trigger. My very own off-switch.

“I love you. We’ll be together forever. We never left her room.” Katniss says the words that are going to destroy me with the quiet, fervent devotion that I’ve always, always wanted to hear in her voice, and those words are joy and peace and wholeness.

“I love you,” I promise her. Of course I do. I always have. “We’ll be together forever.” How could we not be? One shared life. One shared purpose. “We never left her room.” I see her eyes widen and know that I’m locking the chains around her wrists like she’s locking them around mine like I locked them around hers. We cycle perfectly. No escape attempts this time.

I thought losing my soul would hurt, but it’s just doors opening onto annexes I never knew were there. Entire libraries of memory that are so much more important than I ever could have imagined. I want to - _need_ to - find Minerva and thank her.

Well. If we’re effective enough, that will come later.

I open my eyes and look into hers. I know without being able to see my own that our smiles are the same. “We have a lot to do,” I tell her.

“Yes.” She kisses me again lightly. “We should get started soon. But rewards first.”

She leans back on the bed, and I lower my lips to her collarbone. Trace the spot where the ink for the owl should be.

Start kissing my way down.


	14. Chapter 14

I vaguely remember that there was a time when I didn’t know what it felt like when drugs are keeping me from feeling the pain in my body. There’s a particular kind of distant throbbing - like a motion, or texture, but not pain - that says I’d be screaming if it weren’t for the morphling that I’m entirely too familiar with now.

Waking up comes slow and hard. I try to move, find I can’t, subside. Start to drift off again. My eyes try to open. Something’s different.

A distant point of sensation focuses into something I recognize. Someone’s stroking my hair.

“Katniss?” I murmur, or at least I try. My drugged voice didn’t get all the syllables.

A soft, throaty laugh. Katniss almost never laughs, and it never sounds like congealed shadow when she does. Minerva. Not Katniss. I’m only a little disappointed, and I feel safe. Everything else is confusing, but that doesn’t matter if Minerva has me.

“Unfortunately not,” she whispers, shifting on the bed next to me. I think she might be lying down. I don’t want to open my eyes and find out. “I’m sure she’d be here if she could. I’d certainly welcome her.”

I frown a little, not liking the idea for some reason. When I reach for it, the thought is slippery and I can’t hold it long enough for it to make sense. My mind lands on a nearby thought. Something about District Thirteen, and blows to my face, stomach, everywhere.

“What happened?”

“My father decided to use you as a prop for one of his speeches. Apparently, one of my sisters thought it would be brilliant to share classified military information with you beforehand to put you in the proper frame of mind. Not only did Juno’s broadcast team lose control of the speech to a hack from District 13, but you blurted out exactly what you shouldn’t have known on live broadcast and _then_ Diana managed to get her Peacekeepers caught on film beating you within an inch of your life. I understand your blood was all over the frame. It was, in other words, a miserable farce from start to finish.” Even with the low whisper she’s speaking to me in, I can hear the hot coiled anger in her. I wonder if some of that is me. If she’ll punish me for helping Thirteen. There’s no fear along with that thought, though. Everything’s fuzzy.

“The only positive outcome is that you’ve been returned to my care and keeping.” Her lips brush my forehead softly, and the dark silk of her dress has spread itself over the thin hospital sheet separating us. “As soon as the doctors are done piecing you back together, my _mendacem_ , we’ll have our privacy again.”

Apparently that idea does penetrate the mental fog, because I’m curling tighter around myself.

“More machine?” I sound about five years old.

“You’ve had more than enough pain for now.” The way she strokes my hair is soothing, affectionate, like I’m a pet that’s been lost and found its way home drenched from the rain. Like she’s going to wrap me up in a warm blanket and take care of me. “You don’t need to be afraid. I know how brave you can be for me.”

Relief takes the tension out of me, and I shift towards her warmth. “I kept your secrets,” I whisper, not sure I even know what I’m talking about.

“I knew you would.” Her lips touch me again, my temple and then my cheek. “You didn’t have any choice.”

Words like that wouldn’t have been comforting before Minerva. I know that with certainty. But here, no choice is good.

Images flutter in the back of my mind. Choices I had to make. Johanna with an empty smile. Pictures of Gale. Finnick. Prim. Whispers in the dark.

I shudder. No choice hurts much, much less, than choice. Sometimes even not at all.

Minerva is stroking my hair again.

With a happy sigh, I sink back down into sleep.

 

* * *

 

Softness underneath. Light everywhere, but not harsh like my cell. The hum of a machine. A long flexible tube leading from my hand to somewhere above. All of these sensations drift together for a while before I really wake up.

It could be the same hospital room that they had me in after the Quell, or a different one entirely. It doesn’t matter. Just that I’m here, alive, and not starving. Thirsty, yes, but not dehydrated, either.

A shadow moves at the corner of my vision, and I don’t have to turn my head to know what it is. In this gently over-bright place, there’s only one thing it could be.

“Minerva.” My voice is thick, like I haven’t used it in days.

“My _mendacem_. You look much better, I must say.” Silver-blade nails catch the light as she stands and approaches the bed. No bangles. She’s wearing her working clothes. “How do you feel?”

I take stock of my condition. They’ve stopped the morphling. My face aches in a half-dozen places, talking pulls at a row of stitches on my lower lip, and the world is a bit blurry, but only in my left eye. There are bruises up and down my torso, most yellowing now, with one frighteningly large purple blotch along my side.

“Achy,” I answer her at last. “A bit thirsty.” I pause, staring at the big bruise. It has to be from internal bleeding, my kidneys or liver, maybe. Nothing I’d have survived without medical care. “Why did you have them save me?”

“That surprises you?” She pours a paper cup of water from a pitcher just out of reach of me bed, then offers me the cup. “Drink slowly or you’ll choke.”

I take it in little sips, remembering Katniss rationing my water when I was sick. I blink it away.

“Am I really that useful or amusing?” Even accounting for they way Katniss compels us both, it doesn’t seem like enough.

“Oh, yes.” She laughs softly, as though I’ve said something charming, and lowers the rail on one side of my bed to sit down on it beside me. Her fingers slide up into my hair, and my body doesn’t reflexively pull away anymore. “You are far more useful than I ever could have expected, my _mendacem_. Coin made a serious mistake when she took Katniss from the Arena and left you behind.”

The sentence twists in my head. She’s said it before.

We’re in the black room. The rack this time. A report scrolls past my eyes on a holo, and Minerva reads it aloud. The words tumble through my head like a rain of flints, falling into nothing in silence or scraping across something and striking sparks.

“That’s wrong.” My voice is calm and distant in my ears, but full of certainty. “Katniss doesn’t know anything about explosives and Gale wouldn’t let her go on a mission like that anyway.”

“And Primrose?” she asks softly, prompting gears in the back of my head into motion. Prim patching Gale. Steady hands. Certainty.

“Medic training makes sense. She’d want to help. To matter. Katniss would hate it, but it would be easy to hide from her.” My breathing spikes a little on her name, then goes slow and placid again. I stare at the unmoving text, barely blinking.

“Conclusion?” she prompts me again.

“Unreliable. A few plausible or real facts mixed with believable lies.” Distantly, I am aware that some revolutionary in District Thirteen who was loyal enough to be risked on this disinformation plan is going to be killed for this. The spark of the thought gutters and dies.

Minerva brings up the next report.

My fists twist in the sheets and I jerk away from her touch.

I betrayed them. I know I wouldn’t have if it weren’t for Minerva and her drugs and machine, but she’s right. She couldn’t have sifted the bad intelligence out of the good without me. I helped the Capitol maintain the machinery of death and horror and starvation.

Like the end of a loose thread, the memory brings others with it when I pull. Other intelligence-sorting sessions. Building psychological profiles of Katniss, Haymitch, Gale, Prim, Beetee, Finnick.

And another memory.

Two black rooms separated by a clear wall. Johanna on the other side, battered face staring at me in horror. Water laps around her ankles and gets deeper by the second. I have something in my hand like a remote, but there are only two buttons.

“The rebel assets in District Seven. Tell me.” It’s my voice, but it’s not me talking. It’s whatever Minerva put in my head.

Johanna slams her hands against the wall and screams something at me. I know it’s obscene, but I can’t remember the words. I can remember seeing the panic on her face. Phobos, Minerva called the drug she showed me before she had the guards inject Johanna with it. It causes fear.

The only reason that matters to what’s wearing my face as I push the button that pulses an electrical current through the water is because it means Johanna will be talking soon. Another few inches of water. Each time, it’s easier - the fear of water is an ever-deepening imprint, like a rivulet cutting down through stone. All it takes is time.

In this case, a very short time.

“Anyone but him!” She’s screaming, but not to me. Not for me. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know, just _make him stop talking to me!_ ”

I watch my hand put the remote on a tray. Then I turn and leave, not even looking back as Johanna starts to sob her answers to the shadow that moves across the glass.

I’m hunched over now, nails digging into my scalp as I shake. I am an instrument not only of death, but also torture. Torture so awful that Johanna, who takes beatings and asks for more, spilled secrets after a few minutes with me.

I vomit the water onto the floor next to the bed.

Minerva sighs gently. “You really are a very talented boy, my _mendacem_. If you’d been born in the Capitol, I would have selected you for Adjustments early. Or Information, perhaps - you have a gift for scripting believable truths. Either way, you wouldn’t have had such inconvenient scruples.”

“You’re all monsters.” Monsters I helped at the expense of human beings. Already my mind is trying to run, to hide from this knowledge. I won’t let it. I can’t forget this again.

How long until she makes me? A word, a drug, an electrical pulse - she’s done it before. Made me forget and remember and forget and remember. I don’t even know who I am anymore.

 _I want to die as myself,_ I tell Katniss, the words ringing in my head and echoing off the broken mess of my memories. _I don’t want them to change me in there. Turn me into some kind of monster that I’m not._

I forcibly quiet myself, swallow the sobs. “Sorry,” I manage. “I’m tired. Everything’s confusing.”

“I know.” She draws closer again, brushing the damp hair away from my face and offering me a cloth to wipe my mouth with. “It’ll be clearer soon, I promise.” The tenderness in her voice calls up a responding affection of my own, and I want to scream. If I do that, she’ll know and she’ll take my resolve away. I let the affection win instead, and hate myself for it. “As soon as the doctors release you, I’ll take you home.”

I nod sleepily, smile a little. Lie back down. “Soon?”

“Soon,” she murmurs, and bends down to kiss my forehead gently. Her eyes shine like cold metal. “Very soon, my _mendacem_. We have a great deal still to do.”

I nod again, make my breathing slow down, relax my body. I’ve faked sleep before, but I have to be extra convincing this time. I’m not even sure I can, with the collar.

Either she isn’t checking the information or I’ve fooled it, too, because she leaves the room after adjusting the tube in my arm and straightening my sheet.

I examine the room through my lashes. A fish-eye camera over the door means that whatever plan I settle on has to be quick.

My resources are: the bed with its collapsible metal railing, the plastic tubing from the clear bag feeding my arm, a steel countertop and cabinets. The cabinets all have locks, and even if they were open searching would take too long and yield dubious results.

Nothing has been left on the counter.

The fluid bag hangs from a metal pole on rollers. If I could wedge it in a corner, maybe I could get it to take my weight. Still, there’s not enough tubing for a noose, and I’m not sure it would hold, anyway. Plus the collar would get in the way.

The metal railing won’t open enough to get my head into it, and I don’t know if it would get me enough height to hang from. I might just wind up sitting on the floor.

It has to be the counter itself. The metal edge could do a lot of damage to my skull, especially if I fell from standing on the bed.

The vice grip around my chest disappears. I feel almost peaceful.

Quickly I stand, opening my arms, fingertips of one hand above the very edge of the counter, twisting the sheet on the bed to show where my other hand reaches. I climb back on the bed, stand on the mark, and fall backwards, keeping my body straight.

Darkness.

 

* * *

 

My eyes open, and I’m staring up at stars. A whole universe of stars. They’re beautiful. Their peace and joy fill me, and I’m glad. No one can use me any more. I won’t hurt anyone ever again.

And if I’d known dying was so lovely, I’d have done it sooner.

Something catches the corner of my eye, and I turn my head. Fire. Katniss. Her bow pointed at me. Her cold, empty, predatory eyes.

I blink. She isn’t real. She’s flat. Like a painting.

I turn back to the stars, pain starting to wake in the back of my head, then further. Friends from the arena. Katniss in Minerva’s colors.

“No!” It’s a scream. Then a sob. “No.”

I’m alive. I failed.

I curl up on my side. Or I would, except that my hands and feet are shackled to either end of my bench. I at least roll part way over, and start sobbing in earnest.

I’ll never have another opportunity to end this. There is no escape.

“My dear, dear _mendacem_. Lovely, foolish boy.” Minerva’s voice is a whisper, but I feel the edge of my bunk flex subtly when she sits down on it. “The human brain has very predictable signals for when it’s decided to end its own existence. Did you imagine for a moment that I haven’t long since accounted for that?”

“Got far enough to worry you,” I spit, shaking my chains. That was a mistake. The pain in my head flares to life, and I whimper. “Hit hard enough to kill some time.”

“A little. Drug treatment of concussions is very delicate. The chemicals tend to cause seizures. Hence your restraints.” She sighs again, as though I’ve disappointed her. “I really thought we were beginning to understand each other.”

My face twists. It makes me notice that the wounds from the beating are noticeably better. I must have been out for a day or two. Maybe that will have helped someone.

“What is there to understand?” I retort, wiping my tears on the cushion. “I’m a weapon, right? Weapons don’t need to understand. You’ll use me no matter what.”

“Yes,” she agrees softly, “but that doesn’t mean we have to be uncivilized about it.”

I start laughing hysterically. If this is civilization, I hope it burns itself to the ground. Maybe deer or rabbit or goats could rule the earth, then. They certainly couldn’t do worse than we have.

Her hand brushes the back of my neck, just above the collar, and my eyes start to flutter on their own. “Rest,” she tells me in that same horribly gentle voice. “We’ll start work again in the morning.”

I fall asleep still screaming inside.


	15. Chapter 15

“Then that’s decided. We’re allies, you live, the other Careers die.” Katniss lowers her bow and smiles at Cato. There’s no warmth in it at all. “Keep an eye on Peeta.”

Cato’s eyes narrow. “Why not kill him? He’s useless.”

“I want him. So we keep him, for now.” The bow snaps up, so fast I barely have time to start to cry out, and then she’s loosed an arrow and somewhere above us there’s a wet, ugly sound of metal burying in flesh.

A cannon booms.

Cato looks surprised, but he doesn’t say anything. That’s me. “Who was that?” I blurt out.

“Excess weight,” she says flatly, drawing another arrow. “Let’s go.”

 

* * *

 

I can’t breathe, I’m bleeding out my leg, and directly below us there’s a pack of voracious mutts ready to devour me. Still, I have more of a chance than Cato, because he’s cocky and he doesn’t have Katniss on his side.

She shoots, he falls, I collapse. The bleeding is stopped in a dull throb. We huddle for what little warmth and comfort we can scrap together and listen to him die.

The Arena covers many square miles but right now, it’s tiny. Just enough room for Cato’s screams, the pain, and Katniss. She holds me like she thinks enough pressure will heal my wounds, or maybe end the Games. Take us home. I understand, because if I were alone I’d just close my eyes and slip away, maybe to wake up or maybe not. She won’t let me sleep, and I stay alert for her. Show her the stars and moon. Hold her in shaky arms.

She keeps me anchored to life.

She always has.

The sun rises. Katniss kills in mercy. It’s almost over.

The trumpets we’re waiting for don’t come. We try moving, which is every kind of pain imaginable compressed into one long crawl, and Katniss brings me water. Starts binding my leg.

They take Cato. Then my hope. But it’s all right. I got to spend the last days of my life with her, her arms, her kisses and soft words.

Absurdly, we argue. Here and now, at the end,  we argue like an old married couple about who’s going to live and who’s going to die because she can’t understand that I need her to live. Or maybe she can and she just doesn’t want to kill anymore. Or maybe she can’t live without me, either, but that seems too much to hope for. We shove weapons back and forth, I tear off my bandage, I try every word I know to convince her that I love her and she needs to keep living.

There’s madness in her eyes when she reaches for the pouch of nightlock, and I try to stop her at first until she says “Trust me,” and then I understand.

Live or die, we’ll do it together. I kiss her one more time, because there probably won’t be another chance. We agree to a count of three.

The berries are in our mouths when the announcement stops us.

Relieved, I spit them out, wipe my tongue, feel elation. We’re both going to live. We can be together.

I look up. Katniss is throwing some berries on the ground, but not as many as were in her hand. I see her swallow. My heart stops.

But hers doesn’t. I don’t know why, but I’m glad.

I’m still bleeding. The last thing I see hurts more than anything else in the Games.

Her look of disappointment when she sees I’m still breathing.

 


	16. Chapter 16

The sun is slanting in through the boughs of the trees, weaving golden curtains through the faint fog clinging in the air. It’s a little strange not to be baking in the morning, but the forest is beautiful and my fingers itch to paint it.

That will have to wait, because flour-covered or not, I'm working. The Lady needed someone to organize supplies and carry home whatever Katniss shot. I suppose it’s possible that I was chosen because I’m the newest arrival and have the least seniority, or as some sign of special favor I haven’t been around long enough to interpret.

Possible. But the way Katniss smiled when she saw me, all surprise and sharp interest.... I’ve been trying not to think about that since we left the house in the predawn darkness, the Lady and I on horseback and Katniss a silent shadow on foot. The coat she’s wearing over her armor shifts and changes with the forest around her, so I haven’t seen her since the first orange glow of sunrise started in the east and the Lady stopped to watch it spread while Katniss slipped away from us. The only way I know she’s still out there is that every now and then, through the fog, comes the low triple hoot of an owl. That and the dead things in our trail I have to get down and strap to the horse.

The horse. I’ve never ridden one before, and the big bay seems quietly insulted by my unfamiliarity. It certainly refused to take any directions from me. Instead, the Lady tied its lead rope to her own saddle. Now the horse and I ignore each other for the most part, and it seems to work out. I’m just glad I won’t be riding anywhere by myself.

“It’s a beautiful day, don’t you think?” the Lady says softly as we crest a low rise and the hill drops away in front of us, the fog hunkering under the trees so that we can suddenly see for what seems like miles - green and gold and red, stretching between mountains on one side and the glimmer of the ocean’s horizon on the other.

“It is,” I agree, just as quietly. I wrench my thoughts from Katniss’ secret staircase back to the forest. “I see why you spend so much time out here.”

“It’s quiet. Not silent - not the empty stillness of something waiting to happen - but filled up with quiet sounds that mean nothing except to the creatures making them. I come here as often as I can, as often as my work allows me, because peace is the hardest thing in the world to find.” It’s the most words I’ve heard her use at a stretch since I arrived from Twelve. I’m not sure if she’s feeling unusually talkative or if she’s only just decided I’m worth talking to.

I look away, don’t say that the Capitol has a funny way of searching for peace.

“Do you like it here?” she asks me, reaching down to quiet her horse. She doesn’t turn away from the view to look at me, but I can feel her attention shift to me anyway. Like somehow she doesn’t have to turn her head to see me.

“For the most part.” I surprise myself by being honest. “The beauty and comfort beat Twelve any day.”

“Didn’t leave much behind there, did you?” The words make me start in surprise at how close they are to the bone, and her head finally turns to fix me with those shrewd gray eyes. “Katniss sends her pay home to her mother and sister, since she knows I’ll provide everything she wants, but yours has simply accumulated in your account untouched except for the paints and canvas from the household stores. I infer from this that there is no one at home whose comfort you are keen to provide for, or who you wish to remind of the improvement in your station, and from that I further infer that you were glad to leave Twelve and have nothing that draws you back.”

I blink in surprise. I wasn’t trying to hide it, exactly, but I’m not used to people paying enough attention to figure these things out.

“I like puzzles,” she explains before I even think about getting up the nerve to ask. “Especially new ones. So I’m correct, then?”

“Pretty much.” I wonder when she’ll get bored. What will happen then.

The corners of her mouth shift up a fraction in what must be satisfaction, and she runs her hand over her horse’s neck again lightly without taking her eyes off me. “You don’t need to be concerned, Peeta Mellark. I enjoy your pastries and your presence in my home, and you may expect to remain here as long as I am mistress of this estate. Which, as you may well guess, is less likely to change than the sun rising in the morning.”

The words are supposed to be reassuring, and they are, but they also feel like bars closing around me. “Thank you,” I manage, a tiny shiver running up my spine. I cover it by turning to pull a scarlet maple leaf from where it’s stuck in a fir branch.

“When the hunt’s finished, we’ll have a picnic,” she explains - unnecessarily, since I organized the supplies for it myself, but then she continues and I realize that what I know is meant to be prologue to what I don’t. “You’ll join my _venatrix_ and I for it. If you remain pleasant company, perhaps next time I’ll have you paint her as well.”

A pack of conflicting emotions claw at me from all sides, and I let the happiness show on my face with a smile to hide the others. “Sounds great.”

“Good.” The owl’s call echoes through the forest again, and she taps her heels lightly to her horse to set it trotting toward the sound of some small thing’s death. The line tugs, and my horse follows, pulling me along in her wake.

By the time we stop on the rise of another hill, this one dominated by a single enormous oak, the horse is so loaded with Katniss’s prey that the smell of the blood makes me want to gag. If it bothers our Lady, she doesn’t show it, but she does guide the horses around the small clearing before staking them in place so that the carcasses will be downwind of us. Then she dismounts, peeling off her riding gauntlets and tying them to her belt, and takes a deep breath of the warm air that’s finally chased away the fog before waving me toward the clearing.

I go about setting up the blankets from her saddle and the baskets from my own that hold the picnic supplies without looking at her or speaking, because servants speak when they’re spoken to and I’m not sure I want her to pay any more attention to me than what I can’t avoid. But the work is done sooner than I expect, and Katniss still hasn’t appeared, which leaves me without any distraction but the trees and the birds when etiquette and duty require me to open a bottle of wine and fill her glass. I try not to notice that there are three of those in the baskets, when I know I only placed two myself.

I guess she meant this picnic to be my audition all along. The question is, audition for what?

“Pour yourself a glass,” she invites me quietly, her riding dress a pool of crimson and black shadows on the pale blue of the blanket, “and make yourself comfortable.”

Inwardly, I laugh. Comfortable. Right.

The wine tastes like fruit and smoke and spices and puts heat in my cheeks, the back of my throat, my tongue. I finish half the glass and put it down.

“Wow. Good wine.” I frown, promise myself not to drink any more until Katniss comes back.

“I’m very fond of it. An excellent vintage.” She takes a sip from her own glass and sighs contentedly, the black of her pupils dilating subtly beneath the gray metal of her irises. “How long has my _venatrix_ known you, now?”

“We were in the same year at school. District Twelve is small enough that everyone knows everyone else’s name, so technically about eleven years.” I look out into the forest, let my eyes wander along a sunbeam. “But we never really talked. Sometimes she came to the bakery, but it was all business.”

“She’s very beautiful.” The remark is factual, almost without commentary, but her eyes are watchful and intent on my face, as though she can see right into and through me.

There’s an interesting contrast between fallen leaves and moss near the blanket, and I look at that while I think.

Since last week, I understand why the Lady brought Katniss here, though I don’t know how she even knew Katniss existed. Why she brought me along too is still mysterious, but like she said, leaving wasn’t really a hard choice.

Especially since Katniss was going. Does the Lady know how I feel about her?

“Always has been.”

“Yes,” she agrees softly. “Lovely singing voice, too. Forceful. The sort of girl who could have had anyone, if she’d only realized how fascinating she could be. Well. That, at least, can be corrected. Fortunate for both of us, in a way, that it took her so long to understand.”

Fear and embarrassment speed my pulse and add even more heat to my face. I swallow, sit up, look away. The Lady definitely knows how I feel about Katniss.

“Did you really imagine,” she says, gentle as a cat playing with some small vulnerable thing it hasn’t decided whether or not to eat, “that anything occurs in my home without my knowledge?”

I stiffen. I don’t know if she means the staircase or the veranda or both, but either way the humiliation hits me like a punch to the stomach.

“I guess not,” I whisper raggedly.

“A little more wine will help,” she suggests, and I see her taking a sip of her own out of the corner of her eye. “Now. I’ve promised my lovely _venatrix_ anything she wants, and that seems to include you. I can see why she favors you. I trust that you won’t find it a hardship to oblige her?”

My head jerks up, and I stare at the Lady in shock. Now it makes sense. Why I’m here. The list of perks Katniss gets with her new position includes Peeta Mellark.

“When she hurts me and doesn’t care, you mean?” I’m on my feet, fists clenching, taut enough to shake. If I tried to run, the Lady or Katniss could find me and bring me back in about five minutes. I know this. But I have to do something with my fury. “Yes, it’s a hardship.”

She studies me slowly, a hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth, taking in everything about me from the trembling in my spine to the way my lips are pulled back over my teeth. If what she sees moves her more than another puzzle to solve, I can’t see it.

“Katniss doesn’t know that I know,” the Lady tells me softly. “Would you like her to?”

I throw up my hands. “And that would do what, exactly?”

“It would assure her that it is safe, when she inevitably begins to do so, to care about you.”

The words freeze the air around me; I can neither breathe nor move a muscle.

Inevitable. Like all I need to do is give Katniss the pieces of me she wants and wait until they inspire her to want all of me. Like her love for me is a seed that just needs time to grow. Like any hurt she might inflict is temporary.

I find enough breath for a question. “You believe she will?”

“I have been studying people for a long time, Peeta. Certain biological and psychological realities don’t change. Take two people with a certain minimum level of mutual physical and psychological compatibility. Isolate them together among strangers. Provide them with time together in contexts that induce bonding - pleasant or otherwise. Remove practical external pressures that might separate them. Wait.” She smiles at me, a languid expression of comfortable certainty, and fills my wine glass again before holding it out to me. “It is as certain in its own way as baking. All it takes is time and the right preparation.”

I drop to the blanket again, emotions vying for dominance. Skepticism has already withered in the cold clarity of the Lady’s explanation. That leaves fear, disgust, horror, humiliation, betrayal, heartbreak on one side, and on the other hope, happiness, security, and eventually - inevitably - love.

I pick up my glass and finish the wine.

“Then, yes, please tell her.”

The Lady smiles, lifts her glass to me as if in a toast, and empties her own glass. It stains her lips for a moment, vivid crimson, heart’s blood. I hear the soft owl call, three times, closer. Katniss will be here soon.

Part of me wonders if this is what she feels when she lays a snare for the rabbits she brings for the cooking pots. Most of me tries not to think about it.


	17. Chapter 17

One moment I’m walking through the jungle, the next, looking up at Finnick, Katniss screaming my name close by. My chest hurts and my whole body feels jangled, wrong.

She scoops me into her arms, crying, so very scared. I hate seeing her upset, but her distress is real. Her care for me is real. I soothe her and hold her tight.

_The drone of the hovercraft in the sky drags my eyes up from the rolls I’m handing to Madge. It’s only reflex that doesn’t make me drop them. The silver-gray bulk of the hull catches the light as it opens, spilling gray-uniformed soldiers on thin black lines that slide toward the ground like beads on a string. I catch a black shape trimmed in white among them, bow across her back, familiar. Katniss. The Mockingjay._

_Madge screams._

When the fog comes, she drags me as far as she can. Part of me wishes she would just abandon me and save herself. Part of me thinks she’s right to do that, because it’s too soon, we still need each other. All of me wants her close, exults that she’s protecting me, hopes to never let go.

_An arrow buries itself in the wall of Tamra’s tailor shop, punching into the wood and catching fire at once. The flames lick across the wood, searing it, small tongues of fire tracing up and down. I scramble to my feet again, running, too busy gasping for breath to scream. She’s behind me, hunting me, a trail of burning buildings all through the merchant district in our wake. Gunfire rattles, mingling with screams. It’s the only thing I can hear over the pounding in my ears except her laughter._

She plans to die for me. I’m angry, and she doesn’t care. She doesn’t understand and does her best not to. She won’t look at it from my perspective. I hate her a little for it. Maybe more than a little. The locket seems to make a dent, but then she’s kissing and kissing and kissing me, and I surrender. At least for now. I can think of some other way to save her tomorrow. To convince her that my death will free her, while hers will condemn me.

Sometimes I pretend we did get married. For real. A small wedding back home, her family, my friends, toasting bread I made. But it doesn’t matter, because the most important aspect is still true: together ‘till death do us part.

_The Seam is madness - people running, screaming, scrambling for the fences where there are already bodies piled three feet deep and stinking of burned flesh from the electrical fires. I cling to the wall of a hut, coal-dust all over my hands, my knees almost too weak to hold me up. I am going to die. I don’t even know why, but I’m going to die. Katniss is going to kill me._

_Her voice behind me, telling me to stand up. I can’t. My legs finally give out entirely, spill me to the ground, leave me looking up at the arrow in her bow. Red-tipped. The ones that burn._

_“I want you to watch,” she tells me, and lifts the bow over my head and lets fly. The tip bursts into a hut behind me, and it goes up like a tinderbox. The coal dust is sparking, burning in the air, more buildings already blazing up around us._

_Katniss is laughing, singing, untouched._

_The world catches fire._

We don’t want to be separated, but there seems to be no choice. Her lips are gone from mine almost as soon as they touch, and I watch her disappear into the trees.

Later I wish I’d held her longer, made her promise to live, and walked into the force field again as soon as she was gone.

 

* * *

 

Minerva’s steps on the floor wake me from a flood of textures and colors: flour slipping through my fingers, mud, the smooth weave of a tuxedo, the etched golden locket, a pearl, fire, molded-plastic sword grip, leather straps at my wrists and ankles, canvass ready for paint, a smooth clear wall, bread. They all tumble in my head for a moment before I wash up on this side of awake.

She’s singing in a soft, clear voice that fills up my room and rolls off the walls, keeping time with her boots on the bodies of my dead, her hands flashing diffuse light in broken fragments everywhere they touch.

The words spill over me in a tangle, winding and unwinding, a few here and a few there and then enough for a whole mouthful of meaning.

 

_Early one morning just as the sun was rising_

_I heard a young maid sing in the valley below_

_oh don’t deceive me oh never leave me_

_how could you use a poor maiden so._

Strange. Not the sort of thing I’d expect from Minerva. But then again, she seems tangled up in at least one doomed love, so maybe it is her thing.

I shift, pull at the shackles on my wrists. She lets the verse hang in the air.

“Sad song,” I comment after a breath.

“Aren’t they all?” Gray eyes flash over me, cutting into me like scalpels. “Just like all the songs and stories nobody knows. The detritus of history. I’ve been collecting them all my life. ‘You may my glories and my state depose, but not my griefs; still I am king of those.’”

A memory surges up, clear and searing and painful, and then is swallowed up again, sinking to the depths of my mind. I shake my head, but it doesn’t come back. I still know I’ve lost something. “Not me."

“No, I suppose I’m queen of yours as well, aren’t I? No sorrows for you that I don’t permit. Like a walled garden. Lovely. At least, you were.” The shadow of her slides across my bare skin like silk as she bends down over me, and her lips burn mine when they touch. “My father’s people made quite a mess of you - not just outside, but inside. It’s hard to hold you anywhere, anywhen - you go tumbling away again at the lightest brush. It will take me time to fix it. Until then you’re a bomb just waiting to go off.”

Without really moving much I feel myself shifting upwards, towards her, keep my eyes locked on the darkness in hers. “Boom.”

“Exactly.” Another brush of lips, more molten fire in my blood. “It’s worse today. Sound and fury signifying nothing. I really think we may be running out of time. But I have you again, my _mendacem_ , so there are compensations.”

Heartbeat in my ears, the room falls away, just leaving Minerva and her liquid shadow voice, her graceful fingers like steel, her burning lips. “You have me,” I affirm, my voice oddly vivid. I strain upwards again.

“Body and soul,” she finishes the thought, a pool of darkness above me that enfolds me and traps me, rings of burning silver with more darkness inside them. “As long as you live.”

“Forever.” As much as I can, I throw myself into her embrace, but still she holds back. I ache with want, the fire in my blood roaring higher, my whole body a furnace. “Please,” I groan.

Her laughter races through me like silver razors, like lightning. Katniss is watching from the walls, out of the thickening shadows of the room, when she captures my face in those iron fingers and kisses me again. “My _mendacem_.” Her breath soaks into my mouth, down my throat, into my blood. “Will you give her to me?”

“Yes,” I pant without a second thought, “we’re both yours.” It feels right. The world the way it should be, Katniss and I at Minerva’s feet.

The sound she makes is all it takes to rip me open and spill me into the hot dark that closes in around me.


	18. Chapter 18

The orange glow of sunrise leaks in through the kitchen windows as I arrange the last of the pastries on the tray with the eggs and sausages and bacon from the kitchen and the tea that will be finished steeping in just another minute or so. Once I’m satisfied with the presentation, I run my fingers down the lines of my livery to make sure the memory cloth is exactly where it should be (it always is, but I’m not used to that yet) and through my hair to give it just the right half-rumpled feel. Household protocol requires something more tidy, but our Lady likes hair that tempts her hands to run through it.

A musical chord chimes to remind me about the tea. I pull the infuser out, tap the leaves into the compost, and leave it for the dishwasher.

The tray balanced on one arm, I knock gently on the door to our Lady’s rooms at seven exactly. It’s not strictly necessary that I knock, anymore, and she doesn’t give me any reply before I open the door. Still, I do it anyway.

She likes it.

Katniss’s breathing is heavy, sawing the air like a blunt knife on hard bread, and the sound she makes when our Lady looks up to see me enter is almost angry in its distress. There might be a word in it, crushed somewhere between her clenched teeth, but I can’t hear it if there is.

“Peeta,” our Lady purrs, shifting beneath the half-spilled sheet in a way that draws another raggedly smothered sound out of Katniss. “Right on time. Put it on the side table and tell me the state of my household this lovely morning.”

I only take my eyes off Katniss long enough to make sure I don’t drop breakfast on the air next to the table. I was shy about that at first, but our Lady encouraged me. I think she likes showing off her lover to appreciative eyes, and besides, it makes Katniss’s pulse jump.

She’s beautiful - lithe, graceful, strong, skin dappled with scars and tan lines. A braid tries to contain her hair, but it’s escaped all over, dark wisps framing her face, her collar bones, her shoulder.

I watch her grit her teeth as I tell our Lady about food stores, groundskeeping and maintenance, the servants’ morale, the health of the horses, the guest list and decorations for her upcoming dinner party, the color-themed flower arrangements for each floor, the weather predictions for the next week and how it might affect her riding schedule.

Katniss groans and pounds the mattress in frustration. I forget what I’m talking about and trail off. I try to remember, but shifting my weight reminds me that thinking is much more difficult when I’m hard. I bite my lip.

Our Lady laughs in her throat, delighted as much by my distraction as by Katniss’s distress, and then fixes me with her eyes and asks me a question which she knows will require me to think. The cruel beauty of her face at that moment may be the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

“And how is your portrait of my _venatrix_ proceeding?”

“I finished the underlayer,” I reply, blinking hard and dragging the thought from the heat haze in my mind. “And the right paints are on order. It will take...three days to dry all the way, and...then another day for the weekly supply shipment. Then...then I can start the next part. The colors.” I am sure that five minutes ago I knew what that’s called, but not so much right now. Katniss is screaming at us both now, a litany of curses only a miner’s daughter from the Seam would know. I keep expecting that one of these mornings she’s going to run out and I’ll recognize a familiar theme. So far, though, it hasn’t happened.

Those gray eyes hold mine for a long moment, and our Lady’s lips quirk up at the edges. “Very good, Peeta,” she tells me, as though Katniss is as quiet as a mouse. “I’ll look forward to seeing it. When we’re finished with breakfast, we can discuss where to hang it.” Then, almost as an afterthought, she looks down at the thrashing girl beneath her who can put an arrow through a deer’s eye at a hundred yards and smiles. “Oh, yes. I was in the middle of something, wasn’t I?”

Katniss’s fresh explosion of profanity breaks off into a screaming, desperate descant of gratitude as Minerva finally takes mercy on her and gives her the release she’s probably been dying for since at least an hour ago when I was pulling the day’s bread from the ovens. The sound winds me tighter all at once, and I have to breathe slowly and put a hand on the table not to fall over. I swallow, watching Katniss collapse against the sheets, and it’s only when I hear our Lady’s voice say my name that I realize she’s watching me. Speaking to me.

I have no idea what she said.

“Sorry,” I break my gaze away from Katniss. “Sorry, my Lady.” Maybe there should be more to my apology, but our Lady has told me that it’s best to stick to the basics when I’m incoherent.

“I asked,” she explains with the exaggerated patience that tells me both that I’ve amused her and that I’m not going to get a third chance, “whether you want her now, or after breakfast.”

Katniss stirs and mumbles something incoherent. My breath hitches, then races to catch up. “Now, please.” I think I might get brain damage if the blood stays below my waist much longer.

“Well, then.” Our Lady rolls over and stretches out, winding the sheet around herself and resting her fingertips on Katniss’s shoulder just beside her collarbone. Other than those slim steel-tipped fingers, nothing obscures my view of every sweat-slick inch of Katniss’s skin. “You’d best be about it,” she continues, “or breakfast will be cold before we start it.”

My clothes hit the floor and I’m sitting on the edge of the bed next to Katniss. I trail a hand lightly down her cheek. “Hey, beautiful.”

Her lips trace my palm lazily. “I’m hungry,” she tells me in a muzzy voice. “Don’t make me wait for breakfast.”

I huff a laugh. “Right then.” I press my lips to the owl tattooed in the hollow of her collar bone, and lean over her so she can do the same with mine. Then I kiss her down into the mattress, my blood singing in my ears, and sliding into her is easy with how wet she already is, and it’s so, so good. She wraps her legs around me, gripping the back of my neck hard with one calloused hand, and we find the rhythm by reflex now without our Lady needing to remind us.

“Peeta,” Katniss keens into my ear, dizzy and babbling and helpless around me the way she only is after our Lady’s had her first. “Peeta, damn you, yes.” Her eyes close, her body flexing hard against mine, and I know she isn’t going to last any more than I am. Breakfast won’t get cold after all.

“Peeta,” she whimpers into my hair just before we both come apart entirely, “I love you.”

After I remember that I am a person with the power of speech, I murmur “I love you” and “Katniss” and “always” into her skin in between kisses. I’m grinning like an idiot, ready to burst with joy, and when our Lady’s hand slips under my chin and lifts my eyes to hers, I want to babble every word of gratitude I know but can’t even find one to begin with. She smiles at me, knowing without the words, and her eyes spark with a private delight.

“Didn’t I tell you,” she whispers, “that it was inevitable?”

I nod, wordless, and Katniss shifts - ready to ask a question, or maybe just because she’s thinking about biting my neck and setting us both off again. I can never tell when curiosity or base hedonism is going to win with her.

“I’ll have my tea now,” our Lady tells me, her crimson lips parting to let her laughter slip out into the room, “and when we’ve all eaten, I suppose I’ll find some use for the both of you.”

I disentangle myself from Katniss, ready to serve. She makes a little sound of protest, but I hush her with a kiss. Minerva Snow is a woman who knows what she’s doing, after all, and the anticipation will make it better.

All we have to do is trust her.


	19. Chapter 19

More holos in the black room today. I’m strapped to the chair while Minerva paces, asking questions.

“If we do manage to acquire Katniss or Finnick, how should we make use of them?” The holo behind her flashes Katniss, eyes burning into the camera amid the ruin of District Eight, and then IF WE BURN, YOU BURN WITH US and then cycles to the next propo. “Once they’re sufficiently willing to cooperate, of course.”

I’m horrified, can’t believe that she thinks I’d cooperate, and I clamp my jaw shut. But there’s a long pause. Nothing happens. She doesn’t turn on the machine. I don’t understand why, but then I realise that it hasn’t been quiet.

“And Finnick? Finnick is about love.” My voice, but not. I’ve been talking this whole time. Or part of me has. I’m not sure anymore if the person is a piece of myself that Minerva’s cut off from the rest of me, or if he’s really a person at all. If she’s put something else entirely in my head. I can’t stop him, either. I try to swallow, or bite my tongue, but nothing happens. “Make him love the Capitol, or a girl that represents the Capitol. Show Panem. How he’s willing to sacrifice everything for her. For you.”

I’m thrashing, or would be if I could control anything right now. I wonder if Minerva knows I’m listening.

“Annie might be suitable, if she weren’t so scattered.” She pauses, turning the thought in her hands, considering. “But I doubt she could be relied on. Transferring his affections to another girl would be more reliable. Someone we could depend on to monitor him. I’ll screen candidates - one attracted to him shouldn’t be difficult to find.”

My mouth smiles. Other-me chuckles. I want to strangle him. Us. Myself.

“Nope. Plenty of fish. When do you want me on screen again?”

And volunteering for the propos. My insides coil in disgust. He and what’s left of Portia would get along great.

She spreads her hands and sighs. “My father is being unreasonable, but soon. If there’s to be any serious possibility of putting down the rebellion in the Districts, we are going to have start convincing people that the ruin and bloodshed are pointless. Create opportunities for defection. Knock a hole in the perfect image of the Mockingjay. You - not your battered body, but you sane and whole - are the best tool for doing that. The moment he sees that, we’ll begin filming.”

My head nods. Trying to take control is like running into a clear wall. I can’t see it and nothing I do can affect it.

Maybe if I’m quiet. Maybe I’ll start with something small and unimportant. I try to relax, and think about wiggling my toes. I imagine the feeling, what it would look like.

Nothing happens. Or maybe it does and I can’t tell. Panic tries to swallow me again.

“Until then,” she sighs again, reaching down to stroke my face lightly as if in apology, “we have to continue keeping up appearances. You understand, of course.”

He nods his head, all stoic determination. It makes me want to shake myself like a rag doll. “And behind the scenes, we’ll keep working.”

“Always,” she assures him - me - as she turns back to the holo. “Between us, we may salvage this fiasco yet.”

“I know we will. I have faith in you,” he says, like Minerva is his closest ally, like he loves and trusts the Capitol, like he believes the Districts and the rebels deserve the all pain and death that rain down on them. For a moment I’m too horrified even to wish violence on anyone.

The shadows move behind me, and Minerva flicks her hands. The bonds holding me to the chair unlock. “Stand up, please.”

My body complies. When I turn, there’s Katniss, face and white parts of her uniform standing out amid the black of the room.

“You finally came around?” my voice asks sardonically.

“Something like that.” She smiles, all teeth, and flexes her hands inside the armored gloves that are going to protect them when they hit me. “This is going to hurt quite a bit. Try not to die.”

The invisible wall vanishes, and I’m slammed back into my body just as her fist connects with my jaw. I stagger back against the chair, grab it for support, block the next blow with my forearm and wince at the impact of the armor.

“Katniss!” I groan. “Why are you doing this?”

She kicks me in the ribs, then the back of the knee, and I hit the floor hard. Something cracks in my shoulder, but I don’t have time to cry out before her boot drives into my chest and steals my air. “Someone has to,” she hisses out between clenched teeth, kicking me again, and spots of light flare in my skull. “Why shouldn’t it be me? Don’t I deserve it?”

Another groan, wordless this time, is her only answer. I’m too busy curling into a ball and willing myself to disappear. It doesn’t seem to bother her.

The beating goes on a long time. When it’s done, there’s the hiss of a needle in my skin. The pain is reluctant to let go of me.

Eventually, drugged sleep washes it away.


	20. Chapter 20

Some sound wakes me. I blink, shield my eyes from the brightness, look around the cell. Just the usual fixtures, the paintings, my shackles, and me.

I hold my breath, listening.

It comes again. It’s almost not a sound - a deep vibration that I feel in the floor and walls.

An attack?

For a while, there aren’t any more sounds. I stare at the stars on the ceiling. It’s a small comfort.

Some time later, the door opens. Gale in his grey uniform, holding a gun. Two other people standing in the hallway in a guard position.

I blink up at him. “Hello again.”

Gale stares at me for a few seconds, then shakes the thought away. His voice rasps with pain and something else I can’t identify. Not the anger I expect. “Can you walk?”

I jangle my chains. “Yeah, once these are off.” He steps in, scans the collar with a small device that lights up, then takes another from a pouch and runs it over my neck. The collar hisses and crackles, and my vision goes blurry for a few seconds; by the time I can see again he’s pulled a thin metal bar from somewhere and is slicing the chains loose. The cutting edge barely whines. He slides it behind him, where it apparently has a sheath or something, and gets his arm under me.

As he’s helping me up, I feel warm blood against my side. My legs only wobble a little as I stand. I pull away from him, concerned. “I’m up. How many bullets did you take, anyway?”

“A couple,” he admits grudgingly, barely glancing at the walls of my cell as he leads the way out of it. “Who decorated your cell, anyway? A crazy person?”

The last thing I see of my paintings is Katniss with her bow pointed straight at our hearts. On impulse, I wave goodbye this time. “Oh, yeah. Totally nuts.”

A short man in the gray uniform that I haven’t seen before trots over and takes me from Gale, glaring at him. “Soldier Hawthorne, I thought I told you not to do anything stupid.”

“Someone has to look after him. If anything happens, Katniss will kill us. Well, anything else.” He’s doing the pained tough-guy smile thing, and I ignore him, looking for Johanna. I relax a little when I see her in the arms of another rebel. It’s a relief. The times Johanna doesn’t make it out with me are the worst.

“Good, you got her,” I say. Someone’s pulling another girl down the hall, too, one I don’t know but who seems familiar. She doesn’t seem afraid of me.

The group whisks us down a series of corridors, up a maintenance ladder, and out to a waiting hovercraft. The current in the ladder is the only thing keeping Johanna and me on it.

Gunshots explode outside, and a few pound the hull as we rise into the air. I flinch but don’t move from Johanna’s side on the floor.

“Strap in,” Gale commands me. I shake my head.

“Like I said, surviving is no good.” I haven’t let go of Johanna’s hand. “Not anywhere near the Capitol, anyway.”

Gale stares at me for a minute, then shakes his head slowly. “I don’t remember you being this crazy. Annoying, yes, but not crazy.”

Somewhere outside, the world sounds like it’s trying to come to an end, but in here there’s just me, Johanna, Gale, the new girl and the soldiers trying to pretend they aren’t watching us. It’s strangely peaceful.

I shrug. “Like I said, completely nuts. If this is a real rescue and a real conversation, I’ll explain more later. But even if it isn’t, thanks for trying to get me out of here.”

He stares at me some more, and I can’t tell if the look on his face is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen or the saddest. When they can’t get me to stop laughing, they give up and put me out with drugs.

That doesn’t usually happen, but it could mean anything or nothing. It’s quiet, at least.

 

* * *

 

There’s something beeping near my head. I want it to stop so I can sleep, but my arms are too heavy. There’s something taped to my left hand. I wonder if one of the beatings got out of hand again, or if Minerva is trying to patch me up so she can get me back on screen quicker. The first is vaguely more comforting to hope for.

Then I realize that the collar is gone. I fight to open my eyes.

I’m in a hospital room I’ve never seen before. In a bed. Sheets. Clothes. A paper cup of water on a table where I can reach it.

This isn’t the Capitol. Maybe for real this time. District Thirteen, probably. Did the bombing never happen? Am I in a bunker miles below the surface? Something.

The water is still good. I wait for the doctors. My fingers find a bandage on my neck where the wires went in. I don’t think that’s happened before. It’s hard to be sure, though. The waterfall of memories  - delusions? illusions? - tumbling through my head is too loud to be sure I’m actually picking out any one of them and not just getting a random handful of details.

The first doctor and two more of her colleagues come through the door together, flashlights in hand. Another examination. This one takes longer than usual.

The door opens again, and I look up on cue. Freeze.

Katniss.

She isn’t in the Mockingjay uniform, or leather armor, or either suit from either Arena. Just a drab gray jumpsuit. Beautiful. Heart-rending, the way she’s looking at me. Deadly. Cold raw terror starts uncoiling in my chest like poison.

Even though her eyes are locked on me, she doesn’t say anything. She runs toward me, desperation in her face, and the fear is twisting itself around a new emotion now that’s almost too huge to recognize.

I feel her foot in my stomach in the black room, see an orange tulip discarded on the grass, hear the arrow fly into Finnick’s throat, watch rolls soak in mud, watch her swallow poison and live, watch District Twelve burn down around me. Hear her laughing and laughing and laughing.

I push the doctors aside, stand, close the distance. Her eyes fly open in shock when I seize her throat. Skin is beginning to turn blue, her eyes start to dim, and the rage is screaming inside me so loud that I can’t hear anything else or see anything else or want anything except to squeeze everything she is down into nothing.

Then pain radiating like a flashfire through my head, drowning everything in darkness.

Nothing.


	21. Chapter 21

When I wake up with each arm and leg strapped to the hospital bed, I don’t ask anyone to untie me. Waking or sleeping, everything is an overwhelming tangle of memories and confusion. Sometimes everything seems real, sometimes nothing. I know that neither is true; that reality exists, somewhere, if only I can get to it.

Delly helps me sort through some of it: Finnick and Beetee are actually alive. My family really is dead. We’re in the non-fictional District Thirteen. She gives me these and other solid pieces to hold on to, things like soap and school lunches and snowstorms.

I talk to Katniss. It’s still obvious that she’s a danger to everyone here, but I start to believe that she didn’t kill anyone in Twelve. She seems smaller than I remember.

It feels like forever until I’m alone - monitored, of course - in the dark of my hospital room, manacled to the bed because it’s the only way I’ll feel safe enough to fall asleep. I’m right on the edge of slipping off into my dreams, which are at least softer and less overwhelming than my memories, when I hear the door hiss open and then close again. The lights stay too low to see anything.

A tall shadow moves forward, and strong, graceful fingers start carding through my hair.

“I don’t think you’re really here,” I murmur, leaning into her touch anyway.

She laughs softly as she settles onto the bed with me, lowering her voice to a whisper as though to keep it from the microphones. Our own private world. “Whether I am or not,” she notes with lingering amusement, “you’d be the last to know.”

A sleepy chuckle leaves my throat. “And how.” For a few moments, I lose myself to the feel of her hand.

“If I really did escape, what are you going to do now?”

“Continue working, I suppose. As long as there’s a chance to save Panem or my father, that’s where I belong. After that...” She sighs into my hair, settling over and around me, a shield against the world. “After that, perhaps I’ll finally find time for long rides in the forest or listening to the whisper of the ocean.”

With a little twisting, I manage to brush my fingers over the silk of her robe. “I’ll miss you. Or think about killing you. Or both.” I press my face against her hair. “Going to miss me?”

“Terribly. You and our lovely _gladiatora_ both.” Her breath is hot against my skin. “It’s been a long time since I had toys of my own.”

The words give me a chill even as I’m drifting farther into the warmth of sleep. Her warmth. Maybe this will make more sense later.

I doubt it.

“It’s funny,” I muse. “Now I’ve almost killed both of us. Was that you?”

“If I had wanted you to do anything so crude as kill her, Peeta, do you really think I would have had you do something so foolish?” Her lips touch mine lightly, sealing her laughter inside me. “It would have been a knife, or perhaps you hands if strictly necessary, and you would have been alone. In bed. Together. It would have been a fitting moment. But for now, you’re both still alive, and that suits me. Try to keep it that way.”

“Hm. Not sure about that one,” I frown. “If you want us alive, should we be dead? Assuming you’re actually talking to me, which you probably aren’t. Or you are, but you aren’t here. Or I still haven’t left.”

“‘I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.’ Which do you think it is, my _mendacem_?”

The rabbit-warren of possibilities is too complicated to try to follow. I let go of it. Alive is good for right now. Tomorrow might be different. But that’s tomorrow.

“Sleeping now. Bye, Minerva,” I mumble.

“Good night, Peeta.”

Another kiss, and her fingers across my collarbone. Memory stirs and then settles back into sleep ahead of me.

“Dream of me.”

I wake up screaming, and one of the doctors is already reaching for the syringe that will send me away again when I dig the metal railing into my wrists and bring the words I need out in little gasps of tears.

“Don’t,” I tell her. “Don’t.” She studies me for a moment, then puts the needle down. I sag in relief.

They might be nightmares, but at least they're mine.


End file.
